So...
my posts about our move from Longmont, CO, USA to Honolulu, HI, USA have been trending every day for a few weeks now, &I've suspected that they're trending because we flew Alaska Airlines, and the video embedded in the second of two posts has hashtagalaskaairlines in its title *yikes*
Whatever.
When an older post trends on this site, I, typically, go check it out, because I, typically, forget the details/specifics of a post once it starts getting crusty, etc. Thus, our "Moving Day" posts are trending on my site, and they have been for a few weeks, and my theory is that maybe my posts are coming up in searches for/about Alaska Airlines. That being said, it is the first of the two posts that is trending this week, and that post does not mention Alaska Airlines at all, in its title or its description.
Whatever.
None of the above is really my point, because my point is that my bodybuddy/lifemate and I look really fucking good when we travel, and I've not really noticed until now, and it's not because we haven't looked good until now, because we have, but for some reason (the fact that this was a move and not a trip), I am only now realizing how good we must look when we travel.
Not to brag (really, I'm not bragging, there are a lot of people far more well-traveled than I, but I have traveled a lot for the "average" person, *blech*) but I travel a lot, and as a unit, we(thebodybuddy/lifemate&i)'ve traveled/moved quite a lot. We've traveled &or moved by plane, boat, train, bus, lightrail, subway, monrail, small car, large car, cross country and across countries. We did not used to look good when traveling. We looked poor and gross. But then we learned a few things, and figured out other stuff, and by the time we took our first vacation while living in Seoul, we were looking like serious stuff. Not as serious as that one Korean man we saw walking through Incheon, who walked like one serious. serious. serious. fucking. mothafucking. fucking. fucking. bad. ass. mother-fucker. And he had two young adult "boys" (I, personally, think that any Korean man under the age of fifty looks boyish) at each of his shoulders, behind him, and they parted the sea of people as they strutted through that airport in a perfect triangle of power. It was basically the most amazing thing I've seen in an airport, in my life, thus far. Like, it is my life's goal to look just like that guy someday. *yuh-mee*
My point is that it's nearly impossible to look good while traveling for the first time. It requires practice, like all things. The reason why it's so difficult to "look good" while traveling is because most people do not travel enough to get good practice. Some people, obviously, are more organized than others, and so, will adapt much quicker to the world of travel. Some people will travel more than any could hope to dream and will continue to be totally disheveled. It's whatever.
I've always wanted to be good at traveling.
I started young, and I remember the way that some women would just look while gliding through the airport. They looked like they had it all figured out, this travel thing. I always felt hot and dirty, and I always, always, had way too much shit. Always. All I wanted was to be one of those beautiful women, gliding through the airport with one simple carry on and one simple purse/bag. No shopping bags filled with extra stuff collected who knows where or how. No trash strewn from the top of a tote that's threatening to discard all of its contents all over the floor. No digging all desperate through my bag, melting down at the ticket counter, because, "I know it was in here!"
It was never my goal to look good while traveling.
My goal was always to be good at traveling.
And the best place to really get good at traveling is in a really big city.
The city in which we were "travel trained" was Seoul. As an adopted Korean, I could live and job in the country with an F4 Visa. This was back in 2013-2018, and so, no, I don't know if/how its changed since we left, because from now on, we will simply stay in country for the amount of time our passports allow sans visas. The bodybuddy/lifemate was sponsored by his employer, a private English academy called ECC.
Really big cities require you to traverse them with competence. If you do not, you will find yourself lost very quickly. And getting lost, for the budget conscious, can be very expensive, because sometimes it means that maybe you have to pay for a cab all the way to wherever it is you're trying to go, if you can't figure it out by cheap subway/bus.
Navigating a really big city is like taking tiny little trips every day. It can be a whole thing to go from one side of the city to the other for the day. Really big cities also have very different parts of the city, and so, you sometimes have to travel to a very specific part of the city to acquire a very specific thing you want to acquire. In essence, you get a lot of practice traveling from place to place within a very defined space. And since most really big cities have public transportation, you learn how various time tables and routes work together (or don't, boo.).
In really big cities, you can take a tiny trip as often as you like, and when you take tiny trips, trips that maybe take you hours away from your home location, and if you don't have a car, like we don't, you kind of have to pack for a whole day. Day trips are hard to pack for, but what is an international flight day but the best day trip? When you fly internationally, you're packing for the trip trip but also sort of packing for a whole day spent between beds on the outgoing/incoming travel days. And so, all of the day tripping practice that a really big city provides is the perfect amount of practice time because that amount of time is a typical international flight day.
What are international flight days other than long day trips at the bookends of a full-trip trip?
Which brings me to the first trip wherein I'm fairly confident we looked pretty good, cause we were getting pretty good at this thing called travel. Vancouver, BC. That travel day was the best travel day, on record, to this day. We left Seoul early in the morning, flew for ten hours, and when we landed in Vancouver, it was only like noon on the same day (I can't look up the specifics in the travel notebook at this time. I went into my job late and left early cause I'm feeling like shit from something we ate over the weekend, so I'm not up for a deep dive from that trip, at this time. Perhaps another opportunity will present itself in the future from now). Flight went perfectly, our new luggage worked perfectly, our first foray into AirBnbingit worked perfectly, the location of our ABnb and the Bnb itself was perfect, our first slice of pizza was perfect, and the weather was perfect, and every fucking little thing was absolutely perfect.
We even met a friend who was willing/able to purchase us some vitamins, and then we sat in a park overlooking some water as the sun set and created this perfect sliver slice of sunlight across the grass that made its way all the way through the park until, at last, it was night, and so, we hunted down a grocery store and stumbled into Urban Fare (the best grocery store of all grocery stores), bought up charcuterie stuffs, stopped for froyo on the way back to the Bnb, and smeezed some bita and slept like happy little babies until I awoke at 0500, at which point, the bb/lm strolled sleepy-eyed into the kitchen, and I was like, "What the fuck?," and he was like, "What the fuck?," and I was like, "Why are you up?," to which he responded, "You're up." And I was like, "But I just got up for a minute," and then we decided to stay up, take our vitamins, and when he asked me what I wanted to do, I said, "I wanna watch The Lego Movie," like a demanding infant that the bb/lm took as a challenge, and so, he turned on the Bnb-provided Xbox and logged onto the Bnb-provided Netflix account, and we watched The Lego Movie, until we got hungry and went out looking for breakfast, at which point, we found a place called Breka Bakery & Café, and it was the best breakfast we had ever had. And that was literally the first twenty-four hours!
For me, the most important thing you can learn from day-tripping (without a car!) is how little you actually need to get through one day. It's liberating. I used to pack way too much, in general, for month-long trips, and even for like a week-long trip. Day trips can really help to put into perspective exactly what you need and what you definitely don't. In the context of a day trip, you're not in a survival state. You are, however, exposing yourself to the elements of an entire day away from/between homes. There are some things that you are going to be really happy you packed. There are going to be other things that are going to weigh you down the entire day, and you never even used it once! But it's the learning of a thing that we call practice. You're simply going through the motions over and over again, and with every try, you're learning something new about the thing and about yourself.
And so, it is in my opinion that day trips are a really important skill to have in this day&age.
A day trip's amount of time away from home (and without a car!) teaches you a lot of things that are not threatening to your survival. Day trips can teach you about how to thrive. The metaphor of carrying around what you need for a day can really inspire you to whittle down the amount of stuff you have, in general. If you can learn to be comfortable with less on a day's long outing, maybe you'll start to feel comfortable with less on a day-to-day basis. And maybe, eventually, you start to feel uncomfortable with how much shit is just like, Why is there so much crap in this house?!
On a side note, Remember, you traded real money for all of that shit that's just taking up space in your home. Save yourself the hassle. The next time you want to spend money on some stupid shit on the internet, just go flush the money down the toilet. It's the same feeling you'll have when you realize that you haven't even used that piece of shit, so you use it once, and it breaks, so you throw it away.
Day Trips. They can change your life, because they change your perspective.