Em and I decided to watch The Trip to Italy tonight, and now I want to travel even more than I normally do. Watching two men drive through the Italian countryside, eating their way from location to location, drinking wine while staring at beautiful scenery and watching beautiful women. It makes me want to rob a bank so Emily and I can take off with no return date. Well, I guess not rob a bank, but whatever the 2015 equivalent of robbing a bank is, since actual bank robbery seems like a high risk, low reward sort of venture these days.
It would be so wonderful to have that sort of adventure. Emily and I did a seven week road trip when we moved to Seattle, and there is something special that happens when a trip goes on for that long, when your brain flips into nomad mode and you’re more ready than normal to take in the remarkable variety that life and culture has to offer. It was even more exaggerated for us, since we were leaving behind the state of our births for something mostly unknown, in a more permanent sense. I think that trip still has echoes in how we live now, how we approach our city and our world, how we thirst for new experiences.
Traveling for extended bouts to do nothing but write would certainly be a pretty great life. The dream, to imagine myself as an expat writer wandering Europe like I was one of the many real life characters from A Moveable Feast. If only. Instead, I’ll just have to recreate it at home as best I can, without the exotic locales, the insane friends (can’t say I’m disappointed about that one), or the talent. Wah-wah.
I suppose all I can do is work to make those travel dreams come true, one shiny nickel at a time.
