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foto by smith

my unmet myspace friend wednesday kennedy suggested i “write a blog about travel exhaustion and the price of staying on people’s couch’s. i’d love to read that !”

i told her “good idea – i just need to get my brain working,” then realized my brain wasn’t working due to travel exhaustion, etc.

but not just travel exhaustion – lady’s and my mental, physical, psychic and financial expenditures are exponentially greater because we also lost our safe space – our home base place. most folk sit at home, plan travel at home, pack at home, leave home to travel, then return home after a reasonably short interval to relax while assimilating their away from home travel, which is more easily done because they can compare home existence to travel experience.

we sold our home in the usa june 2006, and stayed free in a friend’s shack until we left the u.s.a. august 1, 2006. past 12 months we’ve moved 39 times, slept in 39 serially changing beds as we moved from cleveland through chicago to england the netherlands poland croatia italy france spain morocco and back to england – with some serious serial surreal side trips inter-twined within.

before i enumerate travel problems which lead to physical, mental and spiritual exhaustion, let me say ALL THIS HAS BEEN MORE THAN WORTH IT. i’ll explain why next blog – this is the dark side… sunny side up comes tomorrow.

some of the costs in no particular odor:

spending hours in airports where authorities view you as concentration camp cattle … trying to ascertain which gate your flight leaves from and when … discovering they will change your gate minutes before your flight leaves, sometimes without saying so … not posting gate numbers until minutes before your flight leaves … not announcing your flight is delayed … not telling you your train journey requires train changes along the way … and all those problems are when you speak the language – frequently you can neither speak nor read the language, so all the above become a special psychic tormenting hell of self doubt.

worrying whether you left some object in your bag which will bring the airport possession police down on you (scissors, pens, lighters, make-up, etc) … trying to fit your 6 foot 3 inch body into seats made for thin dwarves for your 10 to 30 hours of travel, seats designed by dr mengele … standing for hours trying to get through hostile rude english passport people … spending hours and hours on the internet trying to find routes, passages, tickets that fit together but always ending up with expensive boring hours or days of waiting inbetween.

once you get where you’re going, you have new languages, new cultures, new customs, new laws, new rules to adjust to … you have no idea how to get from here to there due to bad maps, lack of road signs, roads that have one name east but another west … house numbers when they exist follow no known logic, and they frequently don’t exist … some places have neither street names nor village maps … and some of the folks resent you as rich americans or colonialists or war criminals.

when you don’t read or speak the language you can’t buy what you want or need in stores, and sometimes like i did you gargle with the bubble bath you just bought thinking it was mouthwash because it looked like mouthwash and was between the toothpaste and floss displays in the store … you don’t know where to go to buy your most essential needs … emergency rooms during life threatening situations become terrors of their own when you can’t tell the attendants your problem – for example, when my heart became arrhythmic, they gave me 2 pieces of paper for blood and urine test samples and pointed to the blood room (thank goodness some kind angel took my arm, pulled me into the restroom, pointed at the paper, pointed at the plastic cup, pointed at my groin, pointed at the window with other urine cups) … you don’t know you’re supposed to come back at 11 to pick up the results, so when you go back to the doctor 2 days later to see if you’re dying, she tells you that you have to bus back to town, get the report, and bring it back to her next week because it’s the weekend and they’ll be closed – so you and your wife worry 4 more days.

wherever you go folk treat you as a walking ATM machine because you’re a RICH american … they expect you to shower them with cash … they all want to sell you, use you, eat bits of your flesh, your soul … essentially you exist solely to buy – their stuff, their services, visits to their tourist traps, their hotel rooms, their authentic food served by shills in authentic local costumes while local musicians play the same 3 songs endlessly while constantly passing their begging hats among you even though you’ve already paid to get in, paid to eat, paid for entertainment … in morocco they’ll even invite you to dinner as a gesture of friendship, and then ask you to pay as you leave.

there’s the upset stomachs and diarrhea caused by different country’s widely varying safety of the water supplies … the bad fatty over salted food that’s all that’s available at airports, bus and train stations …. the hours you need to kill waiting for the next stage of bus train plane to depart … there’s the physical stress all these cause, and the mental and psychic stress caused by all the above made even worse by your tired sick badly fed unwashed body … there’s the stink of clothes not washed often enough because many places and nations don’t have laundromats, and you can’t change your clothes often enough because you only have what you can carry on your back and that’s not enough for clean clothes every day so you sniff what you have left to see if it’s still wearable on your unbathed body.

as for the price of staying on other folk’s couches – we’ve been paying our own way. been putting out $75 each day for 12 months so far. but even so worry & stress costs creep in. right now we’re staying for the second time in our london friends place, taking care of their plants and cat. the cat – Marmite – is a marvelous fellow, second only to lady k’s ex-cat 3PO in cool. but something’s wrong with him – his spunkiness turned lethargic, and his ravenous appetite disappeared. we’re waiting right now for him to come back from his daily wanderings so we can see if we have to take him to the vet. i can just see our friends returning in 5 weeks and us handing them their stiff dead cat.

we’ve stayed as guests at other’s governance – and you’re always more cognizant of having to be attentive, considerate, and aware of your hosts’ needs and beliefs. you act differently when you’re a guest. you lose some of your freedom of choice, of movement. you accept social invitations you’d rather not. you’re more subservient when you’re the recipient of another’s generosity. beggars can’t choose.

all this is but a condensed taste of the downside of constant travel. there’s more – i could add endless example, detail, cost, cause. it all causes physical and mental depletion, psychic and physical stress. and, when you’re traveling as a newly married (or even an old married) couple together 24 / 7 / 365, it tests your love and like and understanding of both self and other as well. all i can say about that is i married the only woman in the world for me. i love, like and respect her more now than before we left. i even like, respect and trust myself more now than before we left. all journeys are journeys within as well as without. and you always have to pay for your ticket one way or another – sometimes both. there’s no free lunch – we’re all naked lunch on the end of reality’s fork.

but it’s not all as down and one-sided as i make it sound… will explain why it’s worth it next time.

foto by smith

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