As we get closer to the 3-month countdown, I need to start knocking a few things off my list of necessities for the trip. To escape the slush from the blizzard that hit NY this week, I stopped in the Lululemon in Union Square. I love Lululemon, but have never been able to bring myself to spend the money on their overpriced yoga and running gear. However, this year is about changes, and my mentality has to change to. So, spending $100 on the prettiest shirt I've ever seen, that I'll be literally living in the entire month of April when I travel around Patagonia, is completely worth it. Plus some woman in the dressing room told me I looked adorable, so I had to get it!
Here is a list of the items I think I need at this point. Please, feel free to tell me anything I've missed or anything that's completely unnecessary (minus the travel Scattegories. I think that's COMPLETELY necessary!)
Backpack
DSLR Camera - Nikon D40?
Mini Spanish book
New winter coat. Maybe the one that heats itself if I can justify the $400 pricetag.
New polarized sunglasses
Sleeping bag?
high SPF sunscreen
hand sanitizer
bug spray
Fast drying towel
hiking shoes
locks inflatable travel pillow
waterless soap (and shampoo?)
flashlight
adaptor
first aid kit
anything else I can justify from Lululemon
Cards Travel Scattegories
Kindle? Thoughts?
Here's a little collection of quotes I love that seem to be appropriate for this blog:
We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us. -Joseph Campbell
One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. 'Which road do I take?' she asked. 'Where do you want to go?' was his response. 'I don't know,' Alice answered. 'Then,' said the cat, 'it doesn't matter.' -Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
"You pile up enough tomorrow and you'll be left with nothing but a bunch of empty yesterdays. I don't know about you, but I'd like to make today worth remembering." -Meredith Wilson
"The real voyage of discovery is not about seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes." -Marcel Proust
Seasons change. So do cities. People come into your life and go, but it's comforting to know: the ones you love are always in your heart and if you're lucky, a plane ride away. -Michael Patrick King
The important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.
Not all who wander are lost. -Life is Good
I saw that my life was a vast empty glowing page and I could do anything I wanted. -Jack Kerouac
Dreams do come true, if only we wish hard enough. You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it. -James M. Barrie
Destiny is no matter of chance. It is a matter of choice: it is not a thing to be waited for; it is a thing to be achieved. - William Jennings Bryan
The woman who follows the crowd will usually go no farther than the crowd.
The woman who walks alone is likely to find herself in places no one has ever been before. –Albert Einstein
Two paths diverged in a wood, and I-/ I took the one less traveled by/ And that has made all the difference. -Robert Frost, "The Road Less Traveled"
Moving on is a simple thing it's leaving behind that’s hard. –Dave Mustaine
I'm probably the most impulsive and undecided at the same time person ever. So while conceptually I thought it was a great idea to start a blog, I decided to do that without trying to figure out which blogging site would be the best to use while I was away. So I've now started about 15 blogs, before coming back to this one. So my posts are all f'd up, and my countdown is all wrong, and this is not the right way to start my journey by having 109 blogs and inaccurate countdowns! But I'll have to stick with this one now, so I can have one place to keep my thoughts.
I've done a lot of research on the places I'm planning on going, and decided I can definitely expand outside of the 3 core countries (Arg, Chile & Bolivia). I'd like to go to Colombia and see La Ciudad Perdida, the lost city which follows the whole, trek for 15 years to get to some abandoned ancient ruins that people don't really know anything about kick I've been on. And possibly Venezuela too. I know these things will be all figured out once I'm there, but with 3.5 months to go, I may as well start getting excited about it!
But now here's the things I'm not getting excited about. Giving up my apartment. Seriously, what am I doing! I spent the last 3 years accumulating furniture and moving from place to place til I found the one that I love the most, and now I'm selling all my furniture and putting the wardrobe it's taken my years to build and throwing it into suitcases to collect dust for 5 months? And then what after that? I'll have nowhere to live. And no job. I actually can't even think about any of that because it freaks me out. But I will miss this beautiful apartment, and everything in it. I look around my room, and I'll miss all the little trinkets I've picked up over time. My turkey from Turkey. My little trophy for winning the Park Slope Valentine's Day run. A picture frame of me & the girls in Israel. My crystal flower vase from Prague. What about my TV that I JUST bought and Jesse spent 15 hours drilling multiple holes into my wall to get it mounted? Everything's going to be gone! And Foxy. I miss her when I leave the room for 5 minutes. She's sleeping at my feet right now, and if I nudge her a little she'll come right up and lay next to me on the pillow. I love her so much that the thought of missing a half a year of her little dog life is awful. One day, when she's not here, I'm going to remember that I abandoned her and I'm never going to get that time back. What about that time with my family?! My 3.5 friends? It doesn't last forever, and I'm opting to go BY MYSELF and leave them all. Ok, I'm definitely just having a freakout tonight. I still have so much time, and really it's just an extended vacation. It's just like studying abroad, if I had done that in college this would be the same exact thing pretty much. Ok, calming down now. I've always been a major fan of change - once things get too routine I always find something new to get involved in to change it up, so after 6 years in NY, this is apparently it. Things will be fine.
So I’m still super excited about going. My countdown is now 4 months, 2 days. It still seems so far off that it’s not real, but I know it’s happening. This is a tricky time of the year for me though, because I am completely obsessed with New York City around the holidays. I can’t help it. I know I was raised here, and have seen this nonsense 100 times over again, but I love it. I love the expressions on people’s faces when they see the tree at Rockefeller Center. I love the lights, I love the window displays, I love the music. New York at Christmas is a magical place. Even with the tourists and lines 2 blocks long to eat brunch at Serendipity. I know I’m only going away for a few months, but I think it’s the not knowing what comes after that that’s freaking me out a little. When I realize that I’m giving up my apartment (god how I love this apartment), and not going to see little Foxy for the whole time (which sickens me so much I actually can’t think about it), I start to have some doubts. But I know it’s the right thing for me to do.
I started reading “The Lost Girls” today, and I learned something pretty interesting. Apparently the time period from 28-30 is called Saturn Return - the planet Saturn completes its cycle through your birth chart, which marks the end of youth and start of adulthood. And it brings with it monumental endings and new beginnings. Weird that this is the time I chose to take this trip. I think it’s just that, well…I need a change. Things were great and new and exciting in college. And then I graduated, and started working, and things got monotonous pretty fast. And I tried to do new things - attempted grad school (fail), dance classes (quit), yoga (haven’t gone in months), etc; and nothing seems to be filling the void. I know that a big part of it does have to do with my love life, because professionally things are fine. I went from being in one relationship to the next for YEARS- I think from the age of 16 to 26 I was single a total of like, 3 weeks. And all of a sudden, everything changed and I haven't really figured out what I've wanted since then. I don’t know if it’s been that I haven’t met the right people or I’ve found an excuse for it not to be right every time - but whatever it is, it hasn’t been right. I haven’t wanted to let someone into my life again the way that I did before. I want to feel differently about this, and I’m hoping that being away will shed new light on things for me. Or at least, being away for a while, I won’t care because - I’ll be in South America! I’m excited to read “The Lost Girls”; I’m going on a short 5 day trip to Guatemala on Friday, and I’m looking forward to reading it on the plane. I think it’s going to erase any insecurities I’m having about it - like, hey, you’re throwing away a perfectly good job and your life savings to go glacier hiking and see a few monkeys. But they did it, and so many people do it, and they come back with a new look at life. I’d like to come back and maybe have an idea of how I want to spend the rest of my life - what I want to be doing, where I want to be living - all the ‘important’ stuff.
Where to begin. Let’s start with booking a one-way ticket to Argentina. April 3, 2011. That’s when it will all begin. But it started way before that.
I’ve always lived my life exactly by the books. I worked hard to go to college, to work hard through college to get a good job, to work hard at my job to get a new, better job...got an apartment, paid rent, back to work, lather, rinse, repeat. I started to travel after college, and loved exploring places that I hadn't heard too much about. I found it amazing how everywhere I went was so unique from the next, and I was continually blown away by how much of this world I knew nothing about. The architecture, the people, the language, the customs - everything I encountered was completely new to me. In the summer of 2009, I went to Peru and Brazil, which was the trip that changed my life. I did a 5 day hiking/mountain biking/zip lining tour to get to Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Incas, a place I had seen pictures of but knew little about. Despite the lack of food, sleep and hot water, and near-death experience climbing Huayna Picchu, I felt a stronger attraction to this place than I’d ever experienced in my life. I made friends along the way who had quit their jobs or taken time off to travel, which was a concept unreal to me. That didn't fall into my world view of the proper next step to take. But these people, they were all so peaceful and happy - just wandering without a care in the world. It was something I had never seen before, and made the trials and tribulations back in NY seem so foolish. Standing on line for 2 hours to spend $40 on brunch...going to the gym 6 days a week...working 12 hour days to go home and do it all again tomorrow...none of it could compare with the world my new backpacker friends had opened my eyes to.
I came back to NY and I all I wanted was to go back. My world was thrown upside down. I had made it so far, or so I thought. My great apartment on the Upper West Side. My job in advertising sales where I got to spend every day selling something I actually loved. I had a great family, great friends, a great life - so what was missing? I think it was the element of not knowing what was going to happen next, not taking the next step in my premeditated life plan. Because despite all of the amazing things in my life, all I wanted was to go, for just a little while, and experience this backpacker’s life in this amazing continent I’d had the tiniest glimpse of.
A few months later, my company announced they were looking for people to take buyouts, right around the same time that my brother was planning to travel after graduation. My lease was going to be ending, the buyout would fund my trip, and I'd have my brother, who's also my best friend, to go with - the stars seemed to be lining up for me to do this. I sold my furniture. Gave up my apartment. Found a new home for my cat. Booked a flight. And then found out I didn't get the buyout. I was heartbroken. I was never going to get to see the world. I had created the next step in life for myself and for the first time it hadn't work out.
For the next few months, I started to think that maybe this happened for a reason. Maybe life isn't meant to be planned out the way I'd always done. The whole point of backpacking is going from place to place, living in the moment, and not knowing where you were going to end up next. I realized that if I didn't take a leap of faith and do this now, I may never have the chance to do it. My window of opportunity before I do the next traditional milestones in life - get married, buy a house, have a baby - is narrowing. I made a decision, to stop planning and just live. So April 3, 2011 it is. I have a one-way ticket to Buenos Aires. I'll be spending 5 months with nothing but the backpack on my back, and my memories of the life I'm leaving behind. I'm not going to think about what happens after I get back, where I'll live or work even what city I'll end up in. All I can think about are the place in South America I want to visit. I want to go to Ushuaia (otherwise known as the end of the world), and hike glaciers around Tierra del Fuego. Go to penguin colonies in Punta Arenas and drink wine in Mendoza. Visit the depths of the mines in Bolivia and learn to tango in a milonga in Buenos Stargaze and sandboard in San Pero de Atacama and see the waterfalls at Iguazu.
So let the countdown begin. Viva la South America, ad bienvenidos to my new life!
