Getting Ready to Get Ready

We are preparing for our next big escapade. It’s time for an international trip, to a country we have never been to. We’re going to Japan!

Preparing for travel is so complicated these days. There are all kinds of YouTube videos to watch so you can see what you are going to see before you see it, apps for train tickets, currency conversion, and language translation, and search engines so that you can find out everything you think you need to know but maybe don’t. I dunno, maybe all of this makes the journey too easy. 

In the mid 1980s Mr. K and I longed for adventure. We worked at full-time jobs with only two weeks of vacation a year. We had a lease on an apartment. And a routine. We felt pretty rooted to where we were. We would read stories about people who had criss-crossed the globe, and we would feel envious. We would go to lectures (back in the day you had to do everything in person, how inconvenient!) where travelers – who did not seem all that different from us – explained how they were able to move from country to country on the cheap, sometimes picking up some money by working, but also living extremely frugally. We read a book “Miles from Nowhere,” which still sits on my bookshelf today, about a couple who bicycled around the world. We really wished we were the kind of people who could do something like that. If only we didn’t have to work. If only we didn’t have an apartment. If only . . .

At some point we realized we really didn’t have all that many onlies. If they could do it why couldn’t we? What we needed was a plan. We read everything we could find about going abroad, saved every penny we could manage, figured out the best gear that would hold up under any circumstance, and cut loose. We wanted to go everywhere.

We obtained a hoity-toity American Express card, not because we wanted to impress people when we whipped it out (at that time I felt it was pretty impressive), but because AmX wouldn’t charge a fee for their travelers checks. Plus, your loved ones could write letters to you, and the company would hold them for you in their offices, which were located all over the world. No email or social media posts. A camera with film you had to send away to be developed. No immediate way to be in touch. The two of us would be the only ones who knew where we were or what we were doing.

We started off with $99 tickets to Belgium on the budget airline People Express. And for the next 16 months we traveled through Belgium, France, Spain, Morocco, Italy, Yugoslavia (a forgotten country, it seems), Greece, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, Kenya, Uganda, India, and Thailand.

Our backpacks held everything we needed for daily life. Clothes for warm weather, clothes for cold weather, tent, sleeping bags, sleeping pads, stove, cooking pots, food. 

We used paper maps and books and information we learned from other backpackers in hostels and campgrounds. In India we picked up something that looked like a phone book which included timetables for all the trains in the country. App, schmap!

One of my favorite memories was sleeping in our tent on the roof of a mud hut in a Kurdish village in central Turkey. At night the sky was lit by the billions of stars in the Milky Way. I had never seen anything like it. I stood there in the middle of the desert, staring up, imprinting the vision on my brain so that I could always return to it. It was a spectacle I will never forget. To be so far from home, in (what to me was) a desolate place, in the middle of the night, with sleeping strangers all around, and experience this gift from the heavens. It changed me. 

When we go to Japan, I have a funny feeling we will never be all that far from a city or town. Our backpacks will contain mostly our clothes, maybe some special tchotchkes that we purchase. We’ll have sim chips for our phones. And there’s always wifi! We’ll be able to send photos and messages from pretty much anywhere to pretty much anyone at pretty much any time. At the same time I hope I don’t let instant connectivity interfere with my connectivity to the place. I’ll be sure to look for those moments of quiet and awe, when I can be subsumed by the miraculous workings of the unfathomable universe. 

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