Appreciating time en route
My perception of how long it takes to get to places has come a long way since growing up in Bloomington, Indiana where pretty much everything was a 15 minute drive apart.
Driving an hour up to Indianapolis for a Pacers game was an incredibly long trek. And long family road trips were the worst for my 12 year old self.
I always dreaded the 3.5 hour car ride to my grandparents place near Chicago. It felt like it would never be over. And my dad didn’t like flying so we even took road trips to Alabama and Florida ! (I honestly can’t blame my parents though for not wanting to deal with the stress of taking 4 children through the flying process).
Sitting still in the car for me was such a challenge. And it never felt like we were getting closer to our destination. Granted, it probably didn’t help that every time I asked my dad how close we were the answer was always ‘20 minutes’.
We would pass the time on trips by playing word games or endless loops of the alphabet sign game (thank goodness for Dairy Queen’s and Junction intersections). I was also the nerdy kid who would time the splits between mileage markers to calculate our average speed and keep a notebook tracking the number of license plates we saw from each state. 😃
I definitely didn’t enjoy being in transit and am not sure I found it worth it most of the time. All I wanted was to just be at point A or point B.
Well, now I live in LA. And it’s normal to spend 45 minutes in traffic to see your friend or to go out at night. Normal to drive an hour to Malibu just for brunch.
I’ve made the road trip from Indiana to Los Angeles (30 hour drive) TWICE. I’ll wake up at the crack of dawn and travel an hour and a half just to run 10 miles in the mud. I frequent multi-hour road trips with friends and family. I’m on a plane traveling to see family or go on a trip probably 10 times a year. I’ve taken the 10+ hour flight to Europe multiple times, 15 hour flight to live in Vietnam, 10 hour flight to Peru, and 12 hour flight to Japan. I’ve been in multiple 4 hour bus rides, sometimes just for a day trip at 8 hours round trip. I’ve taken 2 hour ferries to get to islands. Trains all the way across a country.
And I’ll keep traveling more.
The transit time is worth it. 100% of time. Even the times when you get delayed, rescheduled, canceled.
Because on the other side of the journey is adventure. And life is better in adventure mode. The best memories are built in adventure mode.
Because travel gives you perspective. And perspective makes you a better person.
I even appreciate the journey itself now. I appreciate that I am blessed with the opportunity to take the time to travel and experience how far away places are. Being in a plane, car, train, bus, ferry gives me the time to reflect, to reset, and to plan for the next adventure. I’ve even found some ways to get exercise in during travel (anyone else do pushups and stretching in the back of planes?).
So now I don’t complain about the time it takes to travel and the distance between point A and point B. Instead I embrace having the ability to take that travel.
At the end of the day, I’m a doer. And I’m not going to let time and distance stop me from that.
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