The strange thing about traveling, these days, is the sense of having manifested something.  When I was younger it was more about the act of departure and arrival -- the sense of moving away from people and coming back, the age-old idea of a trip that changes you, even if it is just for a weekend.  While much of that still stands, it feels different.  No longer do tray tables inspire scrawled journal entries about how exciting it feels to be in transit, to know the sensation of geographic movement.  Now I mostly try to sleep, I get knots in my back, and I try not to drool in public.  The taste of once-frozen dinner rolls and mid-morning vegetable spread isn't much condolence. 

I think maybe the romance surrounding air travel died on a flight from Atlanta to Seoul, when I spent four of sixteen hours in the airplane bathroom, throwing up and trying to stay conscious.  I have worked hard to train myself into napping uncontrollably, if only to avoid thinking too hard about my digestive tract and all the things I have put it through in life.  The romance of being in transit has completely fallen away; transit is hardly time to reflect on the places one has seen, or time to ponder where one is going.  Rather, it is a miserable experience one must endure between bursts of life.  Here are hours not wasted, but folded somewhere into time.  Though geographic movement seems to take forever while it is experienced, once you have arrived it seems quite sudden.  Suddenly you are home.  Suddenly it is tomorrow.  Suddenly it occurs to you how terrible you smell, how long you have been awake, that you have been on your computer for six hours, and that, for the second time in a day, the only meal you can assemble is farfalle with butter and a glass of apple juice.  It would behoove me to remember to stock a little something in the freezer for Sunday arrivals, when all grocery stores and markets in France are closed.

The strangeness and the delight, as I said, concern the manifestation of a trip -- to plan from start to finish, to assemble tickets, to gather information.  Even choosing destinations can inspire disbelief.  One moment there is a voice in your computer, and a few years later you are visiting a friend in Bosnia.  One evening you see a photograph and decide you must experience its subject directly.  One month you are collecting signatures on campus, then suddenly you are alone in an airport, about to move to a foreign country for a year.  Each journey can be traced by its own string of events, but as you experience them they can feel quite disconnected.  It is hard for me to convey how many times I have stood before monuments or looked out on a view and had an experience that abruptly changes from witnessing the site to an awareness that I really am there, that I decided to do something that seemed impossible and accomplished it.  Sometimes it feels almost by accident.  So often while traveling you are too overwhelmed for clarity, but every now and then a moment hits you and you realize you are standing in the spot you imagined you'd never reach, or that you'd only be able to visit thirty years down the road.  It's freeing.  Anything seems possible when, even if only for an instant, you feel you've controlled the course of your own life.

When trying to capture this sensation, I often return to this video, which ends with, "The end goal of this project, both in its vlog and documentary form is to share people's reasons and motivations behind their trip.  Most importantly, to share what makes or drives a person to leave everything behind: their routines, their friends, the things that are comfortable to us and give us a false sense of security.  There's an infinite number of stories and paths chosen that lead to leaving it all behind.  But even more important than sharing these stories is doing so in a way that helps break down the myths and false fears that people put up.  Because, in the end, it has almost nothing to do with the bike and everything to do with setting out to accomplish something that is intimidating, that is unknown to you -- something you know you have a good chance of failing at, but doing it anyway, and slowly but surely, proving yourself wrong."

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