Why Travel?

This all started when I was about 20 really (I mean, I’ve wanted to go travelling since I was 16 but never thought I would till then). I was working 2 jobs, one in an off-license and one in a bar, trying to make ends meat. I wanted to do something with my life that was an adventure, fun! Working where I was certainly wasn’t doing that for me and my boyfriends business was failing, not that it was ever very successful in the first place.

One drunken night we were sitting with a good friend of ours, Tris. We were talking about what we wanted to do, where we saw ourselves in a couple of years, that normal casual drunken conversation. By the end of the night we had decided we were going to travel the world together, we even drew out our own version of a world map with all the destinations on it we had to go visit, starting with the red lands of Australia. My boyfriend’s business was a reptile pet shop, so Australia was the perfect place for us to explore a land filled with these amazing creatures. My own favorite little lizard was native to Australia, the Thorny Devil.

A plan was formulated. We discussed the finer points like timeline and money and savings. I spent many hours, days and weeks dreaming about the day we would all set off on our big adventure; my heart was set on it…

But it never came.

A whole year later and the business was no more. My Boyfriend eventually relented and closed it down, knowing it was costing more than it was making and neither of us could afford to fund it, as I was the only one working.  I was still working my two jobs, and we still had no savings, we had achieved nothing. It was frustrating. I was desperate to get out of the small town I was living in and try to make something more of myself, it was never going to happen in Loughborough, a small town in Leicestershire, England.

I managed to convince us both that the answer was to move to Glasgow, a big city and my home. There would be more jobs there, and more money. It was the only answer I could think of, since he was having no luck finding work anywhere in the area.

2 months after my 21^st birthday we packed up a van filled with everything we owned, even the reptiles, and set off on the long, very long, journey up to Scotland. Under normal circumstances it probably would not have been so long but the van we were in was old, probably definitely overloaded and cramped. The radio didn’t even work! It was our friend, Muzzy, that drove the 300 and something mile long journey up with us and then back down on his own. It makes me laugh now, but I can tell you at the time it wasn’t so funny. It was the most boring trip I have ever had to take! I felt bad for Muzzy having to do the same trip back; at least he might be able to go a bit faster with it empty.

Within a month or so both myself and my boyfriend were working, I was doing 2 jobs again (Off-license and bar) and he was working in a small smoky pub full of old locals. But he had changed. I no longer felt that this was a person I could travel with, or be with for much longer in my life. The relationship ended. He eventually moved out and got a place of his own and we carried on our lives, separately. Frustration swallowed my hopes to travel and although I would still always say ‘I’m going travelling next year’ I never truly felt that it was ever going to happen, but I kept promising myself it would, one day. All my hopes for my life depended on going travelling now, I had no idea why but I always felt that my life could not go forward without me leaving the country. This in its self was funny, because I had never left the UK in all my 21 years. I had to keep trying, I couldn’t give up. Days, weeks, months passed and I still didn’t feel like I was making any progress.

6 months after the breakup I moved back to Loughborough. I felt I needed to be around friends; something I always had a lack of in Glasgow.

I only had one friend, Marianne; we met through my mum who decided that our shared respect for Stevie Nicks would be enough for us to be good friends. She was right.

However I felt I needed people around me who knew me a little better at this point in my life, so I said I was going back to Loughborough to go to college. And I did. I started a course in childcare, which I didn’t complete. Once again I decided to concentrate on saving to go travelling, and within a few months I had saved up half of the money I knew I needed for my trip of a lifetime.

Sometimes in life something isn’t meant to happen until the time is just right.

That’s what I kept telling myself when something crept up to put travelling on the back-burner, and that’s precisely what happened when my mum called.

Advertisement