Originally read on the Relatable Voice podcast – November 2023

My father was not a traveler. For one, he feared flying, meaning that the few vacations we took in my youth were long crawls across many states in whatever second-hand car we owned at the time. He also didn’t like to spend money, so we’d stay in whichever motel had both a vacancy and was cheapest.

I recall one particular budget motel in Houston. We’d been driving all day and arrived late, so we all went straight to sleep. The next morning, in the light of day, we noticed the swarm of cockroaches in the bathtub and made a quick departure. My father was determined that he didn’t want to spend another night in Texas, which meant another long driving day as we were heading west along Interstate 10. My mother and I agreed on the condition that we chose that night’s accommodation.

I assume this contributed to my being a late bloomer when it comes to travel. That and the fact that one doesn’t make much on an adjunct professor’s salary. I started teaching straight out of grad school. In order to make ends meet, I had a certain number of classes I had to teach, which meant teaching at multiple colleges, and always teaching summers. I did this for several years before landing a full-time teaching position, which I still hold. Suddenly my health insurance was paid for, and summer teaching was optional. Travel, here I come.

Where to first? Tibet, of course, where I was able to spend my thirty-fifth birthday on the Great Wall of China before flying from Beijing to Lhasa and exploring the Potala Palace. I’d heard the train through Mexico’s Copper Canyon was quite an experience, so that was next. This was followed by Peru, as I’ve always had a love of ruins and lost cities, and Machu Picchu doesn’t disappoint. Once I’d reached five countries, ten didn’t seem out of reach. After ten, twenty, and after twenty, fifty.

When travel came to a standstill in 2020, I decided to try my hand at writing a series of travel tales about my experiences. I’ve been photographing since high school, back when the only option was film, and had been sharing my photos online since the beginning of my travels. However, I had never really written about them.

With these travel tales, I tried to focus on memorable occasions and interesting occurrences. I included fifty of them as I was turning fifty the following year. That collection, Can’t Get Here from There: Fifty Tales of Travel, came out at the end of 2020, and I found myself a published travel writer. The title comes from early 2020, when my wife was in Beijing and there was a time where we weren’t sure we’d be able to get her come. Several panicked international calls later, we finally did get her here from there, though a few weeks later than planned.

Having enjoyed the experience of writing about my travels, I soon began work on a follow-up entitled From Tibet to Egypt: Early Travels After a Late Start. Using my travel journals as inspiration, this collection covers my first few years of travel, including Asia, Central America, the Southern Caucasus, the Western Balkans, and North Africa. Rather than the short tales of my first collection, this one explored full trips from my early days of travel, including how I met my Chinese wife while adventuring in Tunisia.

Soon after that book’s release a wonderful thing happened—one could resume traveling. While I thoroughly enjoyed writing about my past travels, I was eager to get back on the road. Despite some hiccups, returning to travel was enjoyable after over two years of cancellations and credits. The first trip cancelled in 2020 was to Fiji and New Zealand. While I was able to cancel the Fiji hotel and the day trips I had booked, the flights to Fiji and New Zealand received credits along with our New Zealand tour.

The next trip to be canceled was to Peru. This would have been my wife’s first time there and seen my return after fifteen years. It’s a beautiful country, and I was eager to return with more photographic knowledge. For this one, the flights were refunded, but the deposit for the tour was given as a credit. At this point I created a spreadsheet to keep track of all of these credits.

For a brief moment near the end of 2020, it seemed some travel options were becoming available, so we booked a resort in Saint Lucia in November that we would never be able to afford usually. But the airline had other ideas as the flights were cancelled, though thankfully refunded. This gave me the idea to start traveling locally.

Saint Lucia is replaced in November with a stay at a winery in Temecula. However, a stay in Palm Springs in December was delayed when California entered a second lockdown as Intensive Care Units reached capacity. Likewise, a January trip to Claremont was cancelled. However, that hotel offers a credit instead of a refund—one more item to add to my spreadsheet.

Things began to improve by February 2021, so we spend a weekend in La Jolla, again at a hotel we usually couldn’t afford. Typically, I’m just looking for a bed and shower in a room. Now I’m looking for rooms with sitting areas as we may need to dine in with some takeaway in this ever-changing landscape. In fact, our first meal in La Jolla was from an Indian takeaway.

Our previous Palm Springs trip is moved to March, where everything is handled through text messages with the owner of the property we’re staying at. April sees a wedding anniversary spent in Santa Monica in an art deco hotel I’d always wanted to stay at, while July saw us using our Claremont credit for a birthday weekend.

There’s no thought of international travel until 2022. Even then, I waited until May to plan our first trip out of the country as things still seemed to be changing monthly. We began our return to travel with Fiji, figuring it was appropriate as that was the first trip cancelled in 2020. Our flight credit was also about to expire, so it was also something I could remove from my spreadsheet.

All this gave me the idea for my latest book: documenting a return to travel after two years away and the changes that have occurred during this time. Unlike my first two collections, this one is about my current rather than past travels and is also the first to include my photography.

It’s title, On to Plan C, comes from our summer in Europe last year being our third attempt at travel that summer. Plan A was sailing up the West coast of Africa. After that was cancelled, Plan B was a Northern European cruise that included three days in Saint Petersburg, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine brought an end to that trip as well.

While the world has opened back up to travel, it is still subject to change.

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