Finding What I Traveled the World for on my Couch

Learning to commit

Selfie I took in the Black and White Desert, an area in the Sahara, west of Cairo.

I Recently read an article by Gemíniel titled My Twenties Have Been My “Almost” Decade, and it got me thinking about my own almost decade.

I’ll be turning twenty-five in July, and I find myself applying for bartending and serving jobs in downtown Cincinnati. I see again, the grinning face of the service industry standing tall above me, looking down and whispering, look who came crawling back…

Just kidding, sort of. I returned from a year of teaching high school English in Okinawa Japan in August of last year. I must admit, I’ve been floundering a bit.

This was my most recent bout of international traveling, but — in my humble opinion — I’ve been to a fair amount of other places. I’m lucky enough to have visited most of the countries in western and central Europe, sailed across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, and also spend two months in Cairo. All of these trips were on my own, with the occasional drop in from friends.

I knew I wanted to travel when I was younger. Like I knew. My dad traveled the world when he was in his early twenties and I grew up on stories of those adventures. Just him and a guitar traveling across Australia, collecting money for charity, living in hostels, and getting into all kinds of trouble. In my last…