on not traveling
It happened slowly. Like other big shifts, there wasn’t a week or month in which I stopped traveling. It was more akin to skipping a menstrual period, and then another. Until this morning when I woke up and realised that I couldn’t remember when I last packed my bags and stopped the post.
I teach yoga amongst a group of teachers, younger than me, who regularly host retreats in Bali and Byron and Bruny. I myself have never been to a retreat, yoga or otherwise. More to the point, I haven’t lived a life in which going to a yoga retreat was a wish that I wanted to satisfy. So in that sense, I haven’t missed out.
I live on an island with a small population amidst incredible natural beauty. Amongst the people I know, there’s an unspoken agreement that the sole risk to our high quality of life is an island mentality that necessitates regular time away to offset it. My ex-husband used to tell a story, late at night to friends round the table, about how he’d slow his car as he drove past the airport just to watch the next plane take off and to long to be on it, at which everyone laughed in recognition. In contrast, whenever I drive past the airport, these days, if anything travel related crosses my mind it’s not romance, but mislaying things and airbnb door-codes.
Travel, for me, is a kind of work that I often return home in need of a break from. I don’t boast about this, and don’t want to put anyone off. However what I’ve found, over the years, especially when traveling en famille, is that the highs and lows of travel just about cancel each other out. Nowadays, when I get away, I find it hard to banish that sinking feeling of money pouring through me like a sieve. My days of backpacking and staying on sofas are over and my discretionary income is limited. There’s a way in which I’d rather not travel at all than wash out my underwear in the bathroom sink and hunt for food to eat cold in my room so as to avoid eating out three times a day. I know it’s bad of me to feel this way. In the past, with money to cushion me, I sided on the plus sides of travel. I loved the simplicity of getting away from it all and striking up conversations with strangers who turned out to be not at all strange and the minimalism that was automatically a part of being somewhere else. In the past, my desire to see old friends and new places was far greater than my dislike of queues, being fleeced for meals I could have cooked better myself, and discovering I’d packed the wrong shoes. I loved being waited on and walking new streets and not washing bedsheets and the dalliance of not having to be somewhere at strict times.
When I first came to Tassie, fifteen years ago, I went on numerous trips around the state, staying in airbnbs and thinking nothing of it, both singly as a writer to interview people and also for family holidays. Then there was a spate of interstate trips to my home town that entailed frequent flights (at one point my kids asked whether we might visit there for something other than a funeral). On all these occasions, once the angst of booking flights, accommodation and a hire car was over, I enjoyed these trips, the weird familiarity of driving around the place I once called home and seeing it through adult eyes.
Ten years ago, on our last family trip to the UK, we stayed all over the country in airbnbs, an experience I relished so much that never for a second did I query whether it was worth the price of being there. Being around friends and family was night and day better than email and phone contact, and I drank it in.
A decade has passed since I was last in London, where I once lived for eighteen years. ‘Do you miss it?’ local friends ask, tentatively. ‘A bit’, I reply, equally tentative, not wanting to be drawn out. I don’t say much more because I honestly don’t know how I feel about the UK anymore, possibly because it’s tied up with the end of my marriage to a man who now lives in the same area of London where we once lived together and our kids were born, and also because I feel out of touch with the place culturally and can’t imagine slipping back in.
These days, when I do leave home, I like to travel for a reason, over and above getting away. Now that I’m on my own more, although less than I thought I would be at this point in my life, I seek different things from travel. The bottom line, and this could be a creeping island mentality, is that in the last year or so I haven’t felt a strong desire to travel. This may be partly defensive, especially as, with my cottage renovations (don’t ask), my bank balance is low. But even apart from this, I now like being at home. I feel quietly consumed by it and have barely noticed that I haven’t traveled lately. Does this make me a homebody, a stay-at-home? Maybe.
A bit over a year ago, I spent three weeks and quite a lot of money in New Zealand, visiting an old friend in the north island and my daughter in the south island. The highlights of this trip are still with me, the landscapes are stunning, but then so are the low lights (phone credit hassles and running out of things to talk about with my daughter on overly long car drives past mountains less spectacular in the flesh, barren even, than they appear in savvy marketing). On the other hand, I also stumbled upon one of my favourite shops, Frances Nolan, on a walkabout in Christchurch, and took to drawing with an intensity that I rarely feel at home. And, when I arrived back home, I felt in need of a rest.
I’ve never wanted to see the Taj Mahal. And though I know never say never, I may not take a walk after lunch in the Pyrenees again. Even as a young traveler, I always cared about where I slept and what I ate and clean socks. And while I admire people who travel for a month with a carry-on bag and a Kindle, I accept I’m not among them.
Perhaps I’m a slowly boiling frog, unaware of my own suffering, slowly being poisoned by an island mentality. Perhaps I’m as boring as hell to friends who are too kind to point it out, as dull as my yellow Labrador, motivated solely by trips to the beach and the next meal. Then again, it could be that I have to finish my renovation that is progressing at an agonisingly slow drip before I can think straight about anything else. Or it may just be that I’m feeling my way, in stunning summer weather, in this new chapter of my life.