Living with wanderlust

[readingredhead]

Oh god, just got hit with the travel bug, and BAD. May have to forbid myself from looking at the photos jayintheclouds is posting of his round-the-world trip, at least for a while -- just looking at some shots of Marseilles and knowing that someone I know is there and that I'm not only not there but also not even close to there is really depressing. I want to have a trip to plan for but the next place I'm going (aside from hopefully hopefully hopefully London to do my MA) will be Ireland with my family and we don't actually have a set YEAR for that, yet. Probably it will be after my sister graduates from college, at this rate. But that means that it's three years I have to wait through.

Of course, if I manage to get the scholarship funding I need to study in London, I could conceivably do more traveling, but both of the scholarships I'm applying for stress the fact that these scholarship programs are meant to foster US-UK communication and are not just a chance for awardees to run around Europe. At least one of them (probably both of them) restricts travel for participants, but even if it weren't in the rules that I can't spend more than a weekend out of country per month, I feel like the level of academic work I'll be engaging in will be enough to keep me primarily London-bound.

And of course this isn't a bad thing, because I have so many friends there and there are so many things to see and to do there that I haven't yet; and of course there are so many things I want to see in the United Kingdom and there are no travel restrictions on that and I would definitely be doing some serious exploring (Wales! Scotland! the west Yorkshire moors!).

But dammit if I don't just want to be on some far-off seashore, with my feet in the sand and the wind in my hair and my gaze turned to the horizon and the setting sun, listening to the way that the passersby talk in foreign tongues and the sounds slip away beneath the pulsing of the waves.

Comments

[bluephoenix8807.livejournal.com]

If only we could just travel more when we wanted to. It seems like this is the time in our lives when we should be doing that, but there's so many other things to prepare for in the future...when we hopefully will get to travel.

I had a bad case of wanderlust myself recently too. I've been following this guy's blog and consequently have dreamed of walking from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. - just for the heck of it.

[readingredhead.livejournal.com]

Omigod. I want to do that! Actually, I think if I could walk anywhere it would be in the UK/Ireland because it is SO DAMN PRETTY, but then I would run into issues of rain and wet and COLD. But if/when I'm back in the UK I definitely have plans to do more hiking, particularly in Wales, so that hiking can be combined with castles. :)

I agree, it is hard to balance things out. I feel like it's like that in a lot of respects -- this is the time when we're young enough to not have to settle down, and yet there's this fear that if we don't start "doing something" we'll never become anything.

My personal goal is to fill up my current passport before it expires in 8 years. And I think I'd also like to have visited at least 5 continents by the time I'm 30, but that's a less concrete goal. I'd also settle for having seen every country in the EU, or having lived in a (non-UK) foreign country for two months or more. Because, y'know, these are totally doable things. (I have to believe they are totally doable things.)

And maybe at some point I'll finally see the east coast of this country?? Seriously.