Working full-time for a travel guidebook publisher can almost be painful in the wanderlust it sparks. A quick glimpse of a European spire or glittering wilderness on the cover of a new issue will have me pining to plan a trip there. Not unlike my time put in working at City Bakery during college when I never tired of eyeing the goods. When I’m fortunate enough to actually act on my whims, I feel that I need to properly digest my travel in order to really enjoy it. Without proper processing, it can dunk soundlessly into long term memory and I would hate for my vacations to disappear like so many pretzel croissants consumed during my time at the bakery.
I recently traveled to Norway and without a moment’s hesitation would tell you that the most stand-out quality of the place was its indelibly gorgeous scenery. This was the reason I wanted to visit in the first place but as it so often happens the absurd rears its ugly head and I can’t help but want to share the more shocking, silly, and gut-ticklingly odd moments of the trip – the man who picked up his takeout pizza by boat as perfunctorily as if he was collecting the paper from his porch; Nelson the ugly, wire-haired Swedish dog, encountered at a family’s rural yard sale, one in a string of Swedish canines as unattractive as the nation’s people are attractive; two men in a campground sauna who joked about the stings from Baltic jellyfish as we leapt into the sea around midnight…just before I emerged covered in red splotches; being offered whale meat by one of a raft of gregarious Spaniards who’ve temporarily fled their country’s double-digit unemployment rate to run the famous fish market in Norway’s hip, second largest seaside city, Bergen.
A themed list like the above is a looser and more casual way to scoop up a handful of disparate experiences and view them together in an attempt to unearth the overall tone of the trip. In Norway, I kept a running list of interesting people I met, from the man at the grocery store who took my boyfriend and I to his house to give us a bottle of wine since the wine store was already closed, to a burly, American jujitsu instructor whose equally large and muscled son is attending a Southern university on a cheerleading scholarship. Photos are another jewel box of memories, but, oddly, in viewing my stash I find that captioning is a favorite entry point but the actual place-related information is a continued work of art that doesn’t satisfy my quest for meaningful processing.
In the end, the goal of consciously reviewing a trip as you travel or after the fact is a method for answering that most personal of questions: why does one love to travel? For me, I want to spend time in geographically unusual areas on earth – a volcano, a dramatic landscape, an ocean teeming with colorful and exotic creatures – and see rarer formations, such as Norway’s fjords, fingers of land outlined by fluorescent, pastel green waters that meander inland for miles, their depth a dizzying counterpoint to the mountains that tower to their sides. Like many, I enjoy meeting people whose approach to life I myself would never have imagined. Most of all, I travel to be surprised. And what’s more surprising than sitting down and putting pen to paper, patting over your own mind and heart to see what’s roiling there, what you believe and value? Travel calls into question who we are, and that is why the overly dramatic and romantic portrayal of travel as transformative and life-altering is, happily, mostly accurate in my experience.