On Being a Travel Junkie

Our names are G and B; and we are travel junkies.
(Hi, G and B!)

For people who don't spend much time at home, we get cabin fever pretty easily.  We can see a commercial on tv for an African safari, or see a travel poster on the metro for the Galapagos Islands and we look at each other and say, "We have to go there."  There's no question, there is only working it out.  How can we save?  How should we plan?  How many years out would the trip be, or could we go sooner rather than later?

Our very first weekend trip as a married couple was when we lived in Hawaii, we went to the Big Island.  We scrimped together the money and the night before we flew, I filled a backpack with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to last us the whole weekend.  I soon learned that food was as big a part of the experience as the sight-seeing, so now we have to budget a bit more.  G is a cheap date, but me?  Not so much.

I use the term junkie in all seriousness.  We always know when we're getting our next fix.  We not only know where we plan to go this year, but we can tell you where we hope to go next year, and the year after that.  We even take our age into account (where should we go while we can still run fast?), and our geographic location (let's save that until we move out west).

And there are times when we realize (like, currently) that our vacation plans are set so far into the future that it would be nice to have a fix, just a little something, to tide us over.  So, let's just go ahead and plan a short get-away!

Destinations are somewhat irrelevant:  they can be domestic, international, just down the road, whatever.  The pleasure is in the going.  I think this is because we lead lives that we want to escape - not permanently, but for kind of a "time out" period.  Our days are packed with traffic, work, traffic, work.  Days turn into weeks and the pressure builds.  So we need to walk away.  Fly away.  Ride away.  Leave the cell phones, the endless connections to that traffic-work grind.  And float around another land for a bit.

Being a junkie is about the escape.  And we're addicted.