Why wander?

I move and I move often.

I grew up in Michigan near the Great Lakes and spent most of my childhood playing in the woods behind my house and summers camping under the stars over the bridge to Canada.

I count myself lucky growing up near the Great Lakes as they’re like oceans - you can’t see the other side, and the other side is another country.

Every summer I would sit on the sand dunes of the Pinery Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada watching the sunset over the water knowing Michigan was on the other side. This vast body of water (Lake Huron) created such a curiosity in me, always wanting to know and discover what was on the edge of the horizon… and beyond.

allowed my imagination to wander and my desire for travel to expand.

The world is big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark. ~ John Muir

My sense of adventure increased when I turned 16 and bought myself a car. My best friend Mariya and I would drive as far as we could for as long as we could. This ended with random weekends in the Upper Penninsula (or “UP” as Michiganders call it), during high school we partied with kids hours away rather than with the local kids.

For college I moved to Grand Rapids because I fell in love with the Grand Valley Campus in Allendale, Michigan. It came complete with a huge river, meadows, sprawling forests, ravines for days and sunsets on Lake Michigan.

After graduating I stayed in Michigan for a while and then followed my first dream to move to Florida. I loved my job that drew me there, and the lightening storms are still some of the best I’ve ever seen but couldn’t say the same for the vibe! One night I had a dream I left Florida, so I did.

San Diego came next bringing with it a better job, immaculate vibes, longer hikes, taller topography, mountains for the first time. Learning how to surf, starting my Masters degree, taking my Yoga Teacher Training, getting certified in so many energy healing modalities and realizing how naturally gifted I was in these methods.

California inspired me and I stayed there much longer than I intended. California was my homebase that I left often and returned to just as often.

From California I started my intense international solo traveling - first to Peru then to Southeast Asia where I lived there for 3 months wandering throughout Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Southeast Asia is still my absolute favorite area of the world and I will always return there - Vietnam has my heart forever and I’ve written about my time in Vietnam here, here and here. Laos here, Cambodia here and Thailand here and here.

Being able to live in both places made my heart happy and settled my soul. One year I left for 9 months with no intention of when I would be returning and spent most of these months living in Bali, India, Nepal and Ireland.

Coming back to California for summer in 2019 I ended up falling in love at Burning Man and moved to Flagstaff, Arizona in January 2020. This date still makes me laugh because I moved right before covid. January and February were spent in South Africa and by the time I had returned stateside it was the season of the coronavirus.

Luckily for me, my boyfriend at the time had a dog named Toby who ended up becoming my 7 out of 11 horcruxes to my soul and so my time alone in Flagstaff with no friends (only for the first few months) was eased by my good boy.

When Toby crossed the rainbow bridge in January 2022 I decided it was time to move again, this time to Costa Rica. After living in the high desert for 2 years I was ready for a lush rainforest landscape. I had never been to Costa Rica before (but I did love my time spent in Guatemala!) but I have always liked to jump in headfirst into things and learn on the way down, it’s more fun, spontaneous and is more authentic to my soul. Costa Rica was beautiful, I spent my time going on road trips with friends exploring the country.

Because I wander as the wind wills and always follow the whispers of my heart, Costa Rica naturally and organically came to an end in October of 2022 and that’s when my soul (and friend Misha) led me to Puerto Rico, where I currently live. I strongly believe that when one door closes a window might open and something even more incredible could happen if you allow the universe to dream for you.

I have always wanted to see as much of the world as I can, for as long as I can, as I can remember. To me, it’s always seemed like such a blessing we were born on this incredible planet with its tall forests, deep oceans, epic sunrises, stunning sunsets and magical mountains.

Traveling has always been my version of self care, and if you’ve had sessions with me you know I recommend traveling to find yourself or even to lose yourself! If you’ve been my student then you know about my Intuition Game I accidentally invented while in high school - using intuition as a mode of travel to deepen your trust in yourself.

Traveling has made me a better person as when I was in desperate need, there was always a stranger willing to help me. If I was stuck on the side of the road with absolutely no hope of getting home, someone always came by and offered help. I call these strangers ‘travel angels’ (borrowed from my dad) as they all showed up at the perfect time and helped me purely out of the goodness of their hearts. I pick up hitchhikers because there was a time that I was one; I am patient with others learning my language because others allowed me patience when I was learning theirs. I help others as much as I can because there was always someone magically appearing to help me.

Traveling teaches you the only constant is chaos and once you jump in and allow yourself to enjoy the ride, rather than trying to control it, things can come together better than your wildest dreams and deepest yearnings.

My favorite story about going with the flow and allowing the universe to dream for you is how I accidentally hiked to Mount Everest Base Camp: I was living in Rishikesh, India and had just realized my 3 month visa was about to expire. My new best friends had intentions of traveling throughout India together so I had to go “next door” to get a new visa. Once I realized the country “next door” was Nepal I knew I had to hike to Mount Everest Base Camp with every ounce of my being. With absolutely no training or knowledge of the hike prior to this realization, I was ready and hiking to Mount Everest Base Camp in 3 weeks time - checking off my #1 must-do experience for my 30th birthday!

Traveling has opened my eyes, widened my horizons and expanded my heart. When you travel, your family grows as they are located all over the world, you care more about international affairs, natural disasters and relief efforts in other countries because it dissolves the boundaries between “them” and “us.”

Travel teaches us there is only “we.”

Train Rides - a poem

So this is what happens when I drink too much coffee and stay up past my bedtime.

It feels Kerouac-y and I like it. 

Life IS living on a sleeper train and jumping from bus to bus scraping just enough together to get to the next destination. There is a certain romance about eating at gas stations, peeing in the woods and not knowing where your next bed is. My heart beats a little louder for people living out of their van, making breakfast out of their trunk in the morning dew in the soft light of a sunrise. Life isn't planning. Life is living for exactly what you want. Not saving up for someday. Someday is a disease that will take your dreams to their graves, graffiti told us on the cement walls of one of our Vietnamese hostels. Bright shades of wisdom from aerosol cans.

In a dirty hostel somewhere in Vinh, we ran into Mike Wadleigh, the creator of the Woodstock documentary. He's gathering data on climate change, he told John. He seemed impressed with our story and told us to expose the lie by living the example. 'You don't need all that money,' he told us before putting on his oversized white helmet and riding off on a motorcycle (only after chatting with us about how the lead guitarist from queen is an astrophysicist and Iggy Pop is one of the smartest men he knows and lectures about life.) I thanked him for the documentary and told him how my generation of people were able to experience Woodstock because of his work. Music is not what it used to be, and a lot of people know that. Mike Wadleigh is 74 and looks not a day over 60 and is a self professed hippie and I love him. There is a serenity in his eyes and a tone in his voice I've never seen or heard before. Expose the lie. We will Mike, I hope we meet again.

'This is the lifeblood, the essence that runs through my veins' I think, as I type this swaying back and forth in my top bunk in a sleeper train headed to north Vietnam in hopes of better weather. We've been rained out of central Vietnam with only 8 more days left on our visas. I'm high on life and way to much coffee this evening. The lurching of the train shakes my already rattled bones.

I go for a late night cigarette in the bathroom but there's someone in there. The train swishes and sways back and forth and I'm nearly thrown into the doors, or out the doors, rather. I look out the windows on both sides and the world whizzes by as I just try to keep my balance. Ahhh such is life.

Finally I find a different bathroom but the door won't shut  I try and I try but the deadbolt just won't lock until I look down and realize I haven't even closed the door all the way. There's something cool about smoking a cigarette in a bathroom on a moving train somewhere in Vietnam, there's something about looking at the lights passing by in the darkness that's extremely calming amidst the chaos.

Purity is not for me, I think taking a drag off my cigarette, I still consider myself spiritual. I fell down that rabbit hole once and came out the same old Alice.

I told Sammie once when we were high sitting in the floor of my first apartment: we have a life we live, and then we have another life, our real life, dragging us by the hair, shouting and screaming our passions in our face saying 'follow me!!!! I know the antidote for the poison in your soul! That 9-5 job you call safety is actually a noose!'

The kids here love us, that being said some of the really young ones are terrified of us. Ironically for the same reasons: John is tall and I am tattooed. We're a walking American zoo. You can look but don't touch the animals, they're wild & they may bite.

I haven't taken too many selfies on this trip. Sometimes I think it's a good thing to not know what you look like. Acne eats away at your soul just like it does your skin. I wonder sometimes what's left.

But then I took a picture of myself on purpose trying to show my scars instead of hide them. So I could stare into what I perceive as negative and love it anyways. So I could work deeper into loving my light and darkness both internal and external. John says I can't take the bad with the good. He's right. 

The most moving thing I've seen on my trip was a young violinist at the train station in Bangkok. He played beautifully and had a speaker behind him playing piano to go with his violin. John and I stopped to watch for a very long time and after a while a shoeless blind man walked all the way up god knows where finding his way by holding onto the railing and stepping one foot in front of the other and he found this boy and reached for his violin and asked him something in Thai. I have no idea what. But the vibration of the music and the frequency of emotion filled the air and I was moved. The simple things we can miss if we're in a hurry in our day to day vs the things we witness when we have no plans at all.

A tumbleweeds the life for me. 

I'm a good writer when I'm properly caffeinated. The Vietnamese do coffee well.

begin at the beginning and go on

 

Planes, trains and automobiles, or rather in our case: automobiles, trains & planes. From saying farewell to our roomies, fur babies and friends, we depart from San Diego with only our packs and far flung hopes for the long journey ahead.

We bid goodnight & good luck to sleepy Southern California while preparing for the long flight ahead, Lizzie-bound, to the other side of the world to visit my friend from college who's been living in and loving China for a number of years. 

The tops of palm trees hang in the cotton candy skyline of Los Angeles, we watch the sun, from a bus window stuck in LA traffic, gently set over the Pacific Ocean. We await our sun rise over foreign land; two days ahead of us separated by only 22 hours. 

Airports are always high energy and exciting to me. The quote from Love, Actualy always rings in my ears as soon as I step inside: "Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion's starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don't see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere." Both me & John are feeling bright eyed and bushy tailed as we wait in line. Wearing the high-collared neck pillow I feel like a rattlesnake (naturally) and begin my best interpretive dance as such. 

The check-in guy at security looks excited for mine & John's trip, in fact, most people do. We are The Backpackers, people respect and fear us. He asks 'how this backpacking thing works' and we respond 'we're about to find out!'