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Is travelling meant to be this hard?

06:30 / 02.12.02

I mean, really. I must have cried more whilst being on the road (the last three months) than in the entirety of the last five years!

I've met a bunch of cool people and in particular three chicks that were just too cool for school and I've found myself crying when they were leaving and afterwards and travelling, in airports and on planes and buses, mostly through heartbreak and exhaustion, and I think about my friends and family back home a lot more and wish they were here or I was there. Are there any fellow travellers that can relate? I have another seven months of this craziness ahead of me!!! How did you cope?

And now I'm considering a relationship with someone who lives virtually the other side of the world from me. Is it even remotely plausible? Even financially it looks like a big no-no.

11:33 / 02.12.02

i guess it depends on the shape and the colour of your soul.
if you know what i mean.

relationships can work, i mean, i have a surrogate,long distance, sex-free girlfriend 19,000 miles away, and that rules. like i say, shes not really my girlfriend, but we are close. we see each other every now and then, and i have no idea when i next will.
it doesnt matter, and i like that.

i wish there was a trick i could share with you, buit i think its one of those annoying 'find for yourself' things.

the only place i can start you off is try not to see the distances, or feel like you will never see any one of them again. the truth is, you will see a lot of them, as they are following the same paths round the world as you, and are now at least slghtly in sycnch with you.

i KNOW i will hang out with the guys i have met from all over the world again, even if there is no way i could tell you how or when.

The Natural Way

11:39 / 02.12.02

I like that advice.

Sorry, I have nothing to offer, Panda. But, you cheeky sod, think of it this way: I'm working as a scheduler at a really lame TV company and yr off around the world.....you bastard...grumble...grrr

21:07 / 02.12.02

Probably, else we'd all just travel all the time and be dharma bums.

Cheer up, lad! If you were just a drifter, leaving each place behind without a shred of regret or a heart in spasm, where would the memories come from when you get back to Blighty? No fun in that. And for each connection you make that tugs at your heart strings, some other poor soul is heading off elsewhere with a similar, bitterweet fondness underscoring new horizons.

Seven months of adventures ahead of you yet. Fabulous! All you need is a rest, a shower and a shave and your blog will be onto volume twelve, with pictures they'll confiscate at customs on the way back.

Me, I'll be in meetings all day tomorrow, staring out of the window at the London Eye and trying not to yawn. Swap?

21:15 / 02.12.02

Just out of curiosity, I was wondering whether you are funding your wanderings on the go with various jobs, or pre-financed? I'm considering a similar venture you see and I would dearly like to hear from the frontline.

21:53 / 02.12.02

raise a heap of cash, and then put it somewhere its hard to reach.
then work.

02:21 / 03.12.02

I took out a bank loan, and saved some wages.

Our Lady of The Two Towers

09:13 / 03.12.02

Maybe you could be like the Littlest Hobo and walk around communicating only by barking? It would at least mean you wouldn't have to shave.

09:25 / 03.12.02

I've only done very short trips - no more than 3 weeks - but it can still be gut wrenching to be far away from home and making it on your own. It's incredibly good for you, don't worry about blubbing, you'll probably learn a huge amount about yourself and never be afraid of anything again.

But as the for the luurve thing, well this old cynic would urge caution....

09:29 / 03.12.02

I got around the feelings of isolation by a) writing literally hundreds of letters and postcards to everyone I knew, thus transforming my every action into heroism and derring-do, and b) becoming vaguely schizoid.

The feeling of anonymous, disconnected freedom is there to be savoured. Enjoy it while you can.

13:55 / 03.12.02

Big thicky question but here goes ... how about travel being hard on the career? I really would like to travel for a period longer than the work-allowed vacation time, but doing so would mean quitting the job that I like and then having to start over with a conspicuous time gap when I get back (and potentially the US economy could be just as much poo on my return, bah). I don't like to think that I'm a slave to the machine, but as much as I'd like to travel, I also like my job. But I don't want to wait until I'm 64 to do a travel stint. Has anyone else had this issue? What did you decide?

Our Lady of The Two Towers

14:00 / 03.12.02

Are you well enough off that you could take a period of unpaid leave from your place of employment and are they flexible enough to offer the same? Otherwise you're just going to have to quit, go walkabout and then have the hassle of finding a job when you're done.

14:00 / 03.12.02

I have heard that US employers are more disapproving of taking time out to travel - is that true? It's such a common thing to do here (in the UK) that it's not really a problem.

I'd say it's a positive thing - spin it on your CV as a mind-broadening experience that makes you a much better employee.

Having said that, it did take me a little while to 'recover' job-wise from taking a year to travel, and I did crappy work for a while. But it was worth it.

16:56 / 03.12.02

My experience chimes with Ariadne's, CJ, but perhaps transatlantic is different. They don't really like you taking holidays at all, do they? Fairly commopn here to take a sabbatical, either for legitimate and professional (obviously career-enhancing) reasons or just for the hell of it, to have a long break and see a bit of the world.

Having interviewed many people for career advancement and trained others to survive interviews and to conduct them intelligently, I can't think of a single time when a career break spent broadening your horizons was ever perceived other than entirely positively. The general response was always that you would indeed be more likely to have grown personally with the experience and, in many cases, have returned to settle in one place for a while, the travel bug out of your system.

Like sfd, I've never managed more than a month away at a time and would love to go for a longer haul before the body goes entirely. The problem we have is putting enough money away to fund it. Arranging the time off would be relatively simple, given enough notice. Maybe the NHS is just an understanding employer, in that way.

I did stare out of the window at Waterloo today and imagine the Panda on a greyhound. Lucky bastard...

14:10 / 05.12.02

I'm at a point financially where I could probably afford to travel for a bit. It's more a career guilt and Puritan work ethic issue, I think - I let the career-minded folks around me get to me too much and nudge me into constantly worrying about skillsets, upward mobility, etc.

(not a bad thing on its own, per se, but I do it out of peer pressure and not out of genuine enthusiasm.) It's also an inertia thing - why voluntarily dislodge myself from a snuggly decent job at a stable location during a bad patch for job availability, etc.

At the moment I'm in night school and have a limited time in which to finish the required courses, so that prevents me from having to make any solid decisions on the travel issue for a few years, at least. all right, knocking that decision ball out of my court again for a while.