The Stay-at-Home Experience of a Lifelong Traveler
Imagine yourself walking into the airport, a plane ticket in your hand and butterflies of excitement in your belly as you experience the joy of going someplace new. You’ve been traveling all your life but somehow this feeling never goes away, and no matter how many times you have done it getting off the plane in a new place always give you a rush.
You walk up to the kiosk to check in your bag, only to be informed that all flights have been canceled due to the rising pandemic. You feel the excitement fade, replaced with a disappointment and as you walk out you catch the eye of a television screen which has the news on, and it tells you that until further notice you won’t even be able to leave your home.
For someone like myself, with a love of traveling and a ‘gypsy soul’ so to speak, being confined in my home is a disappointing and depressing notion. I often find myself surfing the web and looking for travel blogs as I attempt to find some type of solace that the outside world does exist.
This experience is not only limited to life-long travelers like myself and can often describe a whole range of people as well as my particular group, and it can hit all of us hard. However, even though this is a wide experience there’s something different for someone who doesn’t just go out to the bar with friends, but someone who experiences the sensation of seeing somewhere new on a regular basis.
Traveling long distances can sometimes become part of a lifestyle, and just like everyone else the covid 19 pandemic forced us to make sacrifices for the greater good. But what happens when the prospect of being outside your home is less of an act and more of a part of life? The crushing weight of being confined forces you to take on a prisoner mentality, and it causes needless tension at home.
More than the pain I felt, I discovered that I had in fact become addicted to the rush I had mentioned earlier and much like everyone else with addiction I began to go through a withdrawal. As my system detoxed from the dopamine rush, my mind started to become less clouded, and I realized that traveling on a regular basis is not a right but rather a privilege and one that I began to have a new appreciation for as well.
Since those fateful days at the beginning of the 2020 pandemic, and now that traveling is once again open and available, I find myself less inclined to just get up and go as I used to. Instead, I travel less and tend to take fewer flights but rather a few drives out in the country.
It’s hard to contain a wandering soul, and I don’t believe I will ever be able to fully remove my wanderlust from my soul. I don’t know what the future holds, but I do know that I have a new appreciation for the world of traveling.
