Wanderlust
The last two weeks have presented me with an update quandary. I didn’t want to do a photo bomb again entry again, but there hasn’t been much I’ve found this month that I could consider post worthy. Life on an island like Grand Bahama is quiet, and it rolls on inexorably whether the day is uneventful or not. Lacking anything, I figured I’d spend this post discussing just what it was that originally prompted me to make this blog: My desire to travel.
As a kid I loved looking through the National Geographic magazines my dad and grandfather got. I never actually read them, it was the pictures of far off places, amazing animals and fascinating people were what always grabbed my attention. Essentially though it was only a cat’s curiosity. They were nice to look at but I couldn’t be sure these things actually existed. So it went until I went with my grandfather to Scotland during the summer when I was eight. My brother had gone a year or two before and I remember being intensely jealous. Even then though I had no real concept of just how far Scotland was. The most travel experience I’d had at the time was jumping across to Florida, and I thought even that short trip was a long ways away.
When my turn to go to Scotland came, I remember thinking this was going to be a piece of cake. Running around with my grandparents for a month in a place that was just slightly colder and (I thought) essentially the same as Freeport with a few minor differences. Two flights and twelve hours in the air and my thoughts on the whole thing had already changed. The shell shock continued on once we landed and more than I had imagined was different. Exactly what I can’t recall now, but I remember something in my mind thinking “It’s all so different and awesome!” That month was one of the most amazing trips I’ve ever taken, though in retrospect if I could tell my eight year old self anything it’d be “Try everything!”
Every little difference amazed me, every sight that was different from the Caribbean style architecture and feeling I was used to refreshed me, and I wanted more. I thought to myself, “If all this exists, then what about all of the things I see in National Geographic?” I made up my mind then: I was going to see everything that I could. Even though it had just been awoken, my wanderlust stayed quiet after that trip. I think my mind knew that I wasn’t psychologically or financially equipped to come to terms with the urge to travel, so I just let it be. It laid dormant for nearly ten years when, while I was in eleventh grade, the high school I was attending got a few foreign exchange students. The first, Peter, was from Hungary. The second, Justine, was from France. The third, Daniella, was from Guatemala. Meeting and interacting with them reminded me that there was a world outside of the islands and Florida, and I decided to try and enroll in the same exchange program they were a part of. My goal: Japan. I ended up in Thailand, and after that year there was no going back. Any time I returned to Grand Bahama after that I could only take being on island for a few weeks to a month at a time without starting to feel like I was wasting time.
The seven and a half months I’ve spent on Grand Bahama since I left Panama has been the longest I have been on the island since 2005, and Island Fever is starting to sink in. I plan to move soon though, and a future post will outline the finer details of that move. I’ll leave you with this for now though, And remember: All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost.
Sore Feet Stories 