TRAVEL
The world was bigger than I imagined.
I didn't want to just see the world. I wanted to experience it.
Somewhere along the way, travel became more than taking a vacation.
It became a collection of places, people, ridiculous situations and moments I never could have experienced by staying home.
Brave New Worlds
Rome. Florence. The Vatican. Places I had seen my entire life in books and on television suddenly existed in front of me.
I stood inside the Colosseum, saw Michelangelo's Pietà and tossed a coin into the Trevi Fountain.
Then in Florence I stood in front of Michelangelo's David and unexpectedly found myself crying.
Apparently marble can do that.
Through the Canal
Cartagena brought colourful streets and a Chiva bus. Panama brought us through the locks and into Gatun Lake.
Then came Huatulco, Acapulco and Cabo.
Travel also gave me one of its less glamorous souvenirs: a 104-degree fever in San Francisco.
Slow Boat to China
Asia felt like entering another world.
Shanghai breakfasts. Bullet trains. The Korean DMZ. Shibuya Crossing. Tokyo's strange little corners. Singapore's Supertrees.
In Saigon we climbed onto Vespas and ate our way through the city.
Every stop seemed to contain something I'd never seen before.
The Bottom of the World
South America delivered exactly the kind of travel story I seem to collect.
In Montevideo, our tour guide gradually got drunker as the evening went on and encouraged someone to cross a museum barrier.
The alarm worked.
Eventually we reached Cape Horn, surrounded by mountains, waterfalls and glaciers near the bottom of the world.
Antarctica suddenly didn't seem impossibly far away.
The places eventually became memories. The stories are what stayed.
Moments From the World
A collection of places I once couldn't imagine standing.
Rome
Florence
Cartagena
Tokyo
Saigon
Cape Horn
The Misadventures
The perfect trips made nice photographs. The imperfect ones made much better stories.
“Go to your home.”
A passport problem at the bullet train created one of those wonderfully confusing moments that only seems funny after it's over.
The Drunk Tour Guide
A torrential rainstorm, a security alarm, an increasingly drunk guide and an unscheduled stop at a casino so he could get another drink.
No Penguins Today
Bad weather meant missing the Falkland Islands and the penguins I'd hoped to see. Travel doesn't always care about your itinerary.
104°
Sometimes you return from an adventure with photographs and souvenirs. Sometimes you return with a spectacular fever.
There Was Always More.
Every trip seemed to make the world simultaneously bigger and smaller.
Places that once sounded impossibly distant became places where I'd eaten breakfast, gotten lost, laughed, sweated, worried, explored and eventually said goodbye.
And every time I came home, there was another part of the map waiting.
Not Done Yet.
I've seen a lot of the world. Not nearly enough of it.