There is a pile of tickets, stubs, and receipts on my desk. Some are as long as my forearm, and others are as small as my thumb, with writing in different languages. I can see the words Trenitalia, Autobuses de…, and Putnički Prijevoz peaking out at different angles. On top of the pile is a small plane ticket stub. It is furled slightly from humidity, and the ink is fading away from many long miles jostling inside different bags, but it is still legible. It is for a flight with Norwegian Air, leaving Los Angeles International Airport, dated April 24th, 2016. What this plane ticket does not tell you is all the hope it held for me, and how many years of dreaming and planning were behind it.
I had always dreamed of travelling overseas. My father had done it in the 1970’s, and I grew up riding in a child seat on his British steel bicycle through the streets of my hometown in California, listening to stories of shipwrecks, failing to join an Israeli kibbutz due to the Yom Kippur War, and peeling potatoes in a Swiss hotel to afford bus fair to his next destination. For as long as I can remember, I thirsted for an adventure of my own. This desire was compounded when I went to Europe on a summer between college semesters, and met a couple in their sixties in a small Bavarian town called Rothenburg ob der Tauber who were cycling their way across Germany. I was overweight then, and taking a very non-adventurous Rick-Steves-ish tourist route (no offense to Mr. Steves, he’s an inspiration), but I had a vision of myself riding there on a bicycle, and it stuck. I would escape into that daydream whenever I was stressed, whether in my remaining time in college or at my first full-time job in accounting. I would imagine myself gliding on two wheels all over the world: by castles and casbahs, vineyards and deserts, lakes and azure seas, and at last by the gingerbread houses of southern Germany and through the medieval gates of that town.
After I graduated college, I started cycling to lose weight, always with that vision in the dreamy distance. One hot August weekend at home, on a day off from the monotony of accounting, I began to look up plane tickets on impulse. Page by page, line by line, I soaked it all into my imagination. Then I came across a Norwegian Air flight to Spain for under $300. It was just too good to pass up, and I felt compelled to buy it. It was cheap and in the early spring, a great window of time for cycling. But at the forefront of my mind was the fact that buying a ticket would force me to go: I couldn’t push it off until the next year, as I had been doing for many next years past. I clicked my way through the type of ticket I wanted (the cheapest) and the luggage options (also the cheapest) and then through the payment screen down to the bottom. I drew a deep breath, realizing that this had only been a pipe dream until that moment, and I didn’t have any kind of plan. Yes, it would force me to go, but I would have to start reckoning the rest of my life with that fact. To live this dream would take at least two months, for the minimum I wanted to do. By why do a thing if you are only going to do the minimal amount of it? It would take six to do it properly. My job would certainly not wait, so I would have to leave the security of full-time employment. On top of it all, I would have to empty my savings and forbear tens of thousands of dollars in student loans. A realized loss and an opportunity loss. The business-degreed-person in me cringed.
“Screw it,” I thought, and bought the ticket.
It took months and months of planning. Due to visa restrictions, some countries were taken off the list, and more were added: less of Northern Europe, more of Morocco and Eastern Europe. I racked up some good travel companions: my cousin, Jennifer, eventually decided to join me for more than half of it, my older brother, Chris, for a whole month, and some old friends and acquaintances all wanted to tag along or agreed to host me. Plans were arranged, rearranged, scrapped altogether, then arranged again, and the cycle repeated. I even changed that initial plane ticket once or twice. But eventually, I landed on a plan. Or rather, I ran out of time and had to fly with one.
One year ago today, I wheeled my large, dark green REI duffle bag and a shabbily duct taped bicycle box into LAX. After depositing them and saying goodbye to my parents, I stood in a long, traveller congested security line, clutching that newly printed stub with its ticket still attached. To me, that ticket was not just a guarantee of a plane flight, it was a new horizon. The hope that something I had dreamed of for so long would come true. Within 48 hours, I was in Morocco. 173 days, 14 countries, 2 ferries, 12 flights, more than 30 trains, countless buses, and by my best guess, more than half a million rotations of a bicycle pedal later, I was back in that same airport by the luggage carousel, waiting for the same dark green REI duffle bag and a similarly shabby cardboard box to slide down the chute, and make its way around to me on the giant slatted black belt.
Sometimes, my memories of the whole thing pass by each other like in a montage. Sunny Spain, and the running of the bulls, fades into stormy Scotland, and the running of sheep down a glen; a peak in the glen will change to a brooding German castle covered in mist, which suddenly becomes a steaming paella back in Spain. Other times, I will be asked what my favorite part was (the most common question, and also the most impossible to answer), and I can only recall some strange event at random, like eating a bad tajine meal in Morocco (“Yeah, um, my favorite part of the whole thing was sitting in a dirty cafe eating a bowl of boney Moroccan chicken soup with rock-dry bread.”). But to my disappointment, a lot of the time I cannot recall a single image, only abstractions: the facts, figures, and succinct descriptions of daily small talk.
I find it very hard to give a good summary of it all, because it is all too much to summarize, in a sentence, or even a paragraph. Perhaps, I am just long-winded, but this blog is the only way I know how to tell the tale properly, and I will spend a lot of words doing it. Hopefully, this will be enough to satisfy people’s curiosity (and also my long-windedness). Also, it feels as if l as if I lose a part of the story from my memory everyday. What color was that building? What was that girl’s name? That is why I kept all my tickets, and that is why I am writing this.
As far as what you can expect out of reading it, I can only say that to me it was an adventure. Though after you have read it, you might remark that it was not much of one, at least not in the getting-shipwrecked-failing-to-join-a-commune-due-to-war-peeling-potatoes-for-bus-fair kind of way. It will also probably not read much like standard travel writing. I do not aim to just share my favorite places and things to do there. My aim is simply to tell my story. Though I hope it inspires you to have an adventure of your own, that is far more than I can ask it to do.
As for the plane ticket stub on my desk, my view of it has not become one bit more practical. I still do not see just a flight. Rather, I see all the things it allowed me to do, and all the memories it allowed me to make. I see St. Paul’s Cathedral in a London rainstorm; taste a red wine from Andalusia; hear a Parisian florist girl call out a cheery “Bonjour!”; smell Moroccan spices in a marketplace; and feel the warm rush of bubbles around me as I dive into the Mediterranean. This ticket did not just buy a plane ride. It bought a million things. It bought an adventure of my own.
Hi! I’m Patrick! In April 2016, I quit my accounting job in California, and travelled for almost 6 months in North Africa and Europe, half by public transport, half by bicycle. I experienced so much in that time, and my eyes were opened to other cultures and to life in general.
Wiser for Wandering is more than the story of just this trip. It is the story of how new adventures transform us into deeper, broader, and more powerful people.
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