Always the Adventure Love for travel begins and ends with perspective
Bigfork graduate Amber McDaniel shares her adventures from a semester abroad at Oxford University and four months of backpacking across Europe.
I first fell in love with travel almost exactly four years prior to the official start of my backpacking adventure. Funnily enough, it was little old Bigfork High School that first gave me the opportunity. During my junior year of high school, the BHS Spanish and book clubs took a combined sixteen-day trip through Portugal and Spain. While some of the details of this trip have faded from my memory, one moment is as vivid as though it were just yesterday.
We were in Seville Spain, visiting La Catedral de Seville, the third largest church in the world and the largest cathedral. You cannot help but feel small in its vacuous cavern beneath 138ft tall vaulted ceilings supported by stone pillars the size of redwoods.
As I stood there, right between a massive double pipe organ and the tomb of Christopher Columbus, I felt the weight of the experience crash down on me as I realized I was standing in a place exponentially older than my entire country. We Americans have the unfortunate tendency to be a bit self-centered, but in truth, the world is so much wider and older than we can possibly imagine. Perspective is a powerful thing. In that moment, I was hooked.
It seemed only appropriate, then, that one of the first places of my backpacking trip should be that very cathedral. It was my homage to the place that started it all.
Perspective may have drawn me to travel, but other things held me there: the minimalist non-materialistic existence, the independence, and the fact that no one ever asks, “So what do you do?” or “Where do you go to school?” You are not defined by your career or your choice of study. The things that define you as a traveler are things like where you’re from, where you’ve been, and where you’re going. It’s a much more human experience.
One of the most addicting things about travel is the spontaneity of it all. While I did plan out my overall itinerary in terms of destination, transportation and accommodation, I never made plans for what I actually wanted to do in the city. My philosophy was that if I did not have plans in a city, I could not be disappointed in what I did not get around to doing but instead appreciate the things I did do.
Not only that but to-do lists are too limiting. They say, “This is what I’m doing while I’m in this city, nothing more, nothing less.” Without one, I found myself to be a lot more open to spontaneous, genuine experiences and hair-brained proposals. Do you want to break into this abandoned amusement park? Absolutely! There’s an Estonian folk music night going on at an abandoned polymer factor. Great, let’s check it out. Hey, it’s really cheap to get tattoos here in Hungary. What a coincidence, I’ve been looking to get another one.
All of those are things that I did because I wasn’t afraid to just go for it. Travel is about saying, “Yes,” even if you don’t entirely know to what.
Taking that leap of faith into the unknown is terrifying but once you do, once you experience the beautiful unpredictability life as it happens, a bubble of safety only means an immense sense of dissatisfaction. The perspective that first drove me to travel now drives me to never settle. Things do indeed come full circle.