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Published: July 11th 2006
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Euroland awaits... Back when I was a lad, I didn't have tons of money for travel but I still had the bug so I became a de-facto budget traveler. Before arriving at college, I had completed several cross-country (USA) trips in my "classic" 1980 Ford Fairlane. I did a couple of these with a friend, and one on my own. It was great fun being young, broke, and in the middle of nowhere with few commitments and an open mind.
After my sophomore year in college, I landed a gig as a researcher-writer for the popular travel guide Let's Go: USA and spent 7 weeks covering a large swath of the country between Minneapolis and Billings, North Dakota down into the Chiuaua region of Mexico. I did it all on very little moula and had a blast sharing my experiences with my editors back in Cambridge and readers via the book. (This was pre- ubiquitous free internet if you can remember that far back -- I kept sneaking into random college campuses across the country to get to a free terminal for some quick email.)
I became a LG editor in my junior year, which was really fun though it involved travel only vicariously through my writers as I managed the book back in the office. I used some of my earnings at this job to fund my first trip to Europe -- around 2 and a half weeks traveling solo to London, Stonehenge, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Cologne, Germany. I did hostels and cheap food, met lots of other budget travelers (who were mostly traveling for months instead of my measley weeks), then promptly returned home with dreams of extended travel.
Between then and now, I've done quite a lot of traveling to Europe, Australia, Asia, the Middle East, and Central America. It's all been great, but the trips have been mostly short, several week jaunts (plus one amazing 6-week sabbatical adventure). And along the way I stopped traveling cheaply and began spending huge amounts of money on "luxury." I have recently begun feeling a little dirty about this, like I've lost my way. Cheap travel somehow felt more real. I couldn't buy my way out of every little hiccup on the road; I had to work at solving problems. I wasn't isolated in my 4 or 5-star American chain hotel room with satellite TV and a pool; I was sharing a room with lots of other interesting people who wanted to talk to me and with whom I would share adventures (or just shoot the shit). My comfy luxury travel, made possible by high-paying, corporate treadmill-type jobs have isolated me from some of the thrill that attracted me to travel in the first place.
Now I am not one of those granola types who thinks "luxury" is the enemy, and my years of non-budget travel haven't revolved around Pizza Hut and the Hilton -- I've gotten out there and sampled the local food, been out of the hotel for 16/18 hours a day, met locals, etc. But I do think I'd like to get back to basics and have some more genuine experiences grounded in the everyday trials and tribulations of budget travel.
I have friends who think I can't go back. It's too late, they say. You're used to the cushy bed and wake-up calls. You're too accustomed to sleeping in your underwear, watching TV at 3am, and answering your work emails in an air-cond settings even while you're on "vacation." I can accept that doubt. It's a reasonable conclusion to draw based on the lavisheness of my spending over the last 8 years or so.
I have a theory that part of my drive towards the travel high-end has been an attempt to overcompensate for the extreme stress and moral torture of working for big companies in a business capacity. It's not that any of my jobs have sucked -- quite the opposite. But I put so much of myself into my job that it tends to obliterate almost everything else -- I end up working 60, 70, 80 hours and thinking about work during my precious little downtime. I have internal moral struggles and need to make those constant compromises that seem to define today's working world, and these eat away at me and make me bitter and tired. To emphasize to myself that I am truly AWAY FROM THE OFFICE, I splurge on very expensive hotels and meals and such while traveling. In the end, I think this reliance on spending is actially insulating me from the experiences that gave me a rush while traveling in the first place.
So...here's my plan. I'm going to Europe again in the middle of August. I am going to be gone from August 17th through September 5th. I am meeting up with some friends for the tail end of my trip, but I'll have a good 10 days of solo travel before that. I am going to travel cheap. C-H-E-A-P. I'm going to see if I can break out of my current pattern and do it old school. I'm planning to start by spending a few days in Bologna, then on to Slovenia for a week before joining up with my friends in Prague. While own my own, I'll be staying at hostels (!!) and trying not to do anything too ridiculously expensive. I'm not going to be neurotic about it or anything, but I'm planning to hang and spend like the budget traveler I used to be. When I hook up with my friends, we'll be going higher-end than hostels but we'll be sticking to fairly inexpensive 1 and 2 star hotels that cost around $100/night or less.
I'm going to try to use this experience as a guide for how well I'd handle extended budget traveling of a a year or more. I just finished reading Rolf Pott's excellent book "Vagabonding" and I'm in the middle of both the Lonely Planet "Career Break Book" and Rough Guide "First Time Around the World." I own a house and have some commitments here so any such extended travel will take me a while to plan and save for -- several years at least. But I want to start testing my assumptions about how I would travel on an extended trip. I also need to start improving my work stress situation prior to any extended travel, but I'll bitch about that on some other blog. 😊
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Mary
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good luck on returning to budget travel -- there is nothing like it!!