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Excerpts From My Failed Travel Notebook
My summer in Europe was full of remarkable moments — but I forgot to write any of them down
On a Tuesday in March of 2013, hidden in the back room of the Washington, D.C. elementary school library where I worked, I felt myself giving up. On my choice of career and on myself. I was unhappy in the way people in their mid-twenties often are. I felt certain that my two degrees meant I was an adult, but also that I was waiting for an actual adult to tell me what to do. It was my second year working in a school, and I was still anxious at the beginning and end of every day.
That March, my first-grade students were working on a unit about maps and my library was home to 20 globes for them to use as reference. They were situated like orbs on top of the bookshelves I had been painstakingly stocking and reorganizing for a year and a half. The world seemed smaller and manageable when I looked at the globes.
For first graders, though, globes are confusing.
Why can’t I go from D.C. to California if it is only the length of my palm? one asked, pressing his small hand across the continent, middle fingers dipping into the Pacific, almost touching Hawaii. We talked, again, about map scale and I could feel their disappointment with the answer.
When my students left for the day I put a globe on my lap, closed my eyes, and spun it. When I opened them my finger was somewhere in the middle of Africa, holding the world still. I felt an impulsive rush. A summer vacation suddenly felt like exactly what I needed and I booked a one-way ticket to London.
The spine I was hoping to stuff with experiences and descriptions instead got filled with my worries.
From March to the end of June, I secluded myself in the back workroom whenever time allowed and I booked different legs of the trip. I’d only ever traveled to Canada, never outside of North America. I signed up for a help exchange website—a way to secure temporary employment in exchange for shelter and meals—and started to hunt for opportunities: a medicinal garden in Spain, an organic farm in Hungary, helping an older woman with house cleaning in a small…
