Pamplona Spain, 2021

Travel the act of going from one place to another.  To me it is actually going from one place to one I have never been.  If you take one week vacation every September and drive the same route to Walt Disney World every year you are not traveling you are simply commuting on an annual basis.

Travel to me is covering new ground, or at the very least re-discovering places you are no longer familiar with due to time.

Airplanes travel is wonderful, the speed, the amazing distances covered.

But traveling by plane, you leave from the controlled environment of a modern airport into another controlled environment, in an enclosed metal tube, shielded from the wind and the moisture in the clouds.  Passing so far over the landscape that it looks like a model.

But give me the treks across surface of our planet via feet, cars, boats, and trains as a means of conveyance.  Traveling only a few feet above the surface, with the ability to touch Mother Earth, or Terra or if you want to be fancy Gaia.

Hiking, more specifically backpacking, walking over every rock and tree root as you trudge over solid dirt.  Coming out of a tree line and discovering a wonderful meadow or actually seeing a hill in the distance and then climbing it to look back where you just were.

Getting on a trailhead at one road and then walking, trudging, and plodding to different road is like a magical short cut.   But you earned the magic by putting on foot in front of the other.

Car travel, or more commonly referred to as The Road Trip is an American innovation.  Road Trips are almost an obsession with Americans, in our movies, tv shows and music.  Feeling the vibration of the asphalt meeting the tires while hugging a green shaded mountain road, or the hum of engine as you move across Death Valley.  On a Road Trip you deal with fuel, both vehicle and human and the sanitary or sometimes unsanitary conditions along the way for personal bodily functions.

Cedar Island Ferry leaving Ocracoke Island, Sept 2025

If you can involve a boat along with driving, it might be one of the most all-embracing, overall best Road Trips to make.  Piggybacking your vehicle onto a boat then going out to sea, or across a river, or any body of water is a novelty.  To smell the sea as you go by ferry from Hatteras to Ocracoke or across the Bay of Fundy.  Catching a little wind whipped spray as you ride the cable pulled ferry across Lake Ticonderoga (after you pull the rope to raise the call flag) to take you from New York to Vermont.

On a ferry you might deal with the possible harshness, unpredictability, or unforgiving nature of the water (please familiarize yourself with the nearest life preserver station).  But after you have taken that risk on the water you then you get to drive off as you reach the safety and surety of dry land.

Amtrak Returning from Baltimore

Trains, the orginal superhighway, crossing North America from 6 months to only 6 days.  There is nothing better than crossing America or any country, sitting in the club car where you have your favorite beverage, notebook and reading material sitting right in front of you at a table that is as comfortable as your own home kitchen table and the scenery changes.

On trains you see great vistas while leaving the driving to someone else; you also get to see the seams of a country, the abandoned factories, the trashed neighborhoods, the less than stellar storage areas; you get to see both the amazing and the imperfections through a train window.

But traveling, if you pay attention, involves expanding the senses.

Smelling the swampy marshes of North Carolina. Driving with the windows down in your friends BMW as you pass through the pineapple fields going towards the North Shore of Oahu.  Even the unpleasant odors of a gas station restroom that you simply must use because you have been holding it for the last fifty miles, so you hold your breath and do what you need to do.

Getting ready to cross the Bay of Fundy, 2018

The sensation of the blowing grains of sand attempting to obscure Route 12 on Ocracoke Island.  Touching and then forever knowing the difference between granite and sandstone rocks on the Appalachian Trail.  The change in deck vibrations as your ferry docks when you reach St. John in the province of New Brunswick.

Tasting that wonderful cold Diet Coke you just bought on Amtrak. Or digging out the last foil packaged semi-dry processed sweetness of a Pop Tart as you drive at sixty-five heading towards the vague promise of motel and you hope they have a decent clean bed.

But if you embrace the feet, the car, the ferry, or the train as your means of travel. When you accept the deferred and delayed satisfaction of reaching your destination, you begin to embrace the tried-and-true cliché “It’s the journey not the destination that matters.”

Categories: My Views On The Real World, Travel and Diversions

Tags: amtrak, Bay of Fundy, boat, Cedar Island, ferry, hiking, road trips, Spain, Trains, travel, travels