The hardest part of travel isn’t what you think. It’s not the jet lag, food poisoning or being stuck in the middle seat on a 12-hour flight between two people who’ve haven’t showered in months or possibly ever.
The hardest part of travel is actually coming home. The longer I’ve been gone, the harder the transition is to life in America is. (This time I was only gone for five months in Hong Kong, Southeast Asia and Australia.)
The first few days and sometimes weeks of being back in the States are bliss. Those moments are filled with an overindulgence of the things I missed – cheese, bagels, breakfast tacos, hot showers with consistent water pressure, cheese and driving around with the windows down, singing horribly loud to Jimmy Eat World like it’s 2002. Did I mention cheese?!? (There’s no cheese in Asia.)
There’s nothing quite like that first trip to the Super Target, one of the great wonders of the modern world, where I can literally buy EVERYTHING I need in one place instead of going to five different stores to get the same things. Life in America is pretty convenient.
The reverse culture shock is a constant struggle. I always forget about sales tax and end up arguing with the Walgreens’ cashier about why my $1.99 mints aren’t really $1.99. The Southern drawl can sound so thick that I find myself pausing to translate it in my head before responding.
For me, the trick to readjusting is to learn how to take advantage of America’s virtues without falling victim to her vices. It is a daily balancing act. Plastic grocery bags remind me of the polluted beaches in Vietnam. The endless line of injury lawyer billboards with get-rich-quick marketing tactics are a reminder of the fact that I can’t afford U.S. health insurance, which is part of the reason I’m spending so much time abroad. (I want to start a GoFundMe page to replace these billboards with photos of kittens, puppies and baby llamas with thought bubbles that simply say “Drive Safe!”) However, every time I brush my teeth, I am grateful for the privilege of safe, drinkable tap water, after months of filtering my own.
Defining home is even more difficult. Where is home? When people ask me that question, my response is a laugh.
It’s a simple question with a complicated answer. In the past 10 years, I have lived in five states (South Carolina, Missouri, Alabama, California and Texas) and five countries (England, Australia, India, Thailand and the U.S.).
My favorite writer and fellow traveler, Pico Iyer, addressed the topic in a TED talk a few years ago. Over 220 million people live in a country that’s not their own. In his Ted talk, Iyer says what if the question “where do you come from?” simply means “Which place goes deepest inside you? Where do you try to spend most of your time?”
I surely don’t belong in that small South Carolina town where I was born. I was always the outcast. People thought I was crazy for wanting to travel. If the people who go after what they want in life 120% are crazy, then I’m happy to be called crazy. Life’s too short to do otherwise.
People often ask if I will ever settle down or if I want a home base. I’d like a home base but more than one. I love Texas but I also love Thailand. Buenos Aires also has a special place in my heart. Ideally, I’d split my year between a few different places between my work travels.
I’ve spent the last ten years living on a bridge between America and Asia. From 2009 to 2012, I spent two to six months a year working/traveling in Asia, which I considered making my home. I kept going back to America even though I never felt like I belonged there. I spent two months in Thailand on my recent Asia trip. It was the first time I’d been back to Southeast Asia in five years. The minute I got off the flight in Bangkok, it felt like home in the same way that Texas feels like home. Five years ago, I made a decision to go back to the States. While I loved Asia, I felt like I could only build a career in the U.S. (Plus, the lack of cheese might have had something to do with it.)
Pico Iyer makes another interesting point in his talk: “Home is not just the place where you happen to be born. It’s the place where you become yourself.” If this is true, then home is Northern England; Birmingham, Alabama; Sydney, Australia and India. Those four places had the single greatest influence on shaping my future.
The one thing that makes my traveling life easier is my ability to pick up where I left off with people I haven’t seen in months or years like no time has passed. Home is less about a place now for me and more about the people. A large portion of my adventures now are visiting old friends. (I’m currently typing this from my friend’s couch in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is another form of home.)
Home to me is many things: an overnight train through an Asian jungle; the arrivals hall at the Charlotte airport (the closet airport to my hometown); and a suitcase. It’s riding bikes with my nephew on my parent’s farm and taking silly photos of my gnome.
Home is meeting an old friend for a beer in a foreign city.
Above all, home is the road. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
