exploring: travel woes in summer 2023

Hi, I’m Elaine, this is Elaine is XYZ and I am back to being travel crazy baby. It’s been over three years and I am READY AND WILLING to run my body ragged crossing too many customs checkpoints over the next month.

Well, unlike 2019, I didn’t quit my job. I’ve been extraordinarily lucky in my experience of the pandemic, and that’s extended to me benefiting from one of the best gains from the pandemic - my work allowing me the flexibility to digital nomad it up.

I spent last summer in New York City and all I got from it was feeling hot, humid, and abandoned by the friends I DID have in the city as they chose to spend those months elsewhere. So this year, I chose to be like them.

I’m going to try to do better on actually making videos of it this time around - I’m hoping to ride on the excitement of doing real adventuring for the first time in a long time and really make sure whatever footage I film here doesn’t end up languishing in a drive somewhere til the end of time.

Like I have so many video files of my time in Nairobi and Mombasa, my walks through Lisbon, several other awesome experiences in China that are just… taking up space now.

And it’s all because, I felt like each video had to have some sort of narrative, impart some sort of lesson, give some sort of cool unknown travel tip - which is really hard to do when, oftentimes, you’re experiencing that particular place for the first time. I’m not a journalist anymore, I don’t have anyone to help with research. I sometimes have a cool local or knowledgeable guide to take me around, but it’s not a given and I can’t prep beforehand so that my crew of me knows to get shots of what exactly I need to film.

I’m just a girl who feels compelled to make videos that I want to watch… of myself.

So instead of trying to pretend to be an expert in everything, I’m going to try something different this trip - I’m going to just try and be a vibe! So experience this along with me, my pals, on my European Summer 2023... or not.

Because ha. That didn't happen...

might need to transcribe this part!

Here is me getting to the airport about 6 hours early for my actual flight in the hopes of making it onto one of the three United Airlines flights that were supposed to be leaving to London beforehand. And friends, I’ll skip to the end, it was not successful because:

...Which meant that I had to talk face-to-face with an agent, but the line to do so lasted three-and-a-half hours.

Well no, it probably would have lasted longer than that because I hadn’t made it TO an agent before all the possible standby flights had left and I needed to board the one that I definitely had a seat for. So here is me consoling myself to missing an entire day of activities with some really mediocre airport dinner. Little did I know that I would be delayed... for another three hours.

But… in the end I did in fact make it!

And since basically everything scheduled in the program for that day was over anyway, I didn’t even mind the extra 90 minute bus delay as we crawled through traffic.

I don’t think I actually mentioned what I was going to the U.K., and specifically Cambridge this time around, for… But a bit over a decade ago I studied here for my masters. Our ten year anniversary fell on 2021, which was cancelled due to some pretty obvious pandemic-related reasons.

I reached out last year to ask if alumni relations wouldn’t be able to help us host a belated one. They agreed… and nine months later…

It was a little too late for dinner by the time I arrived, but I managed to get to closing out the pub with everyone! The pub was The Eagle, by the way, known for many things including Watson & Crick announcing they’d discovered DNA.

And you know what? The rest of the weekend was so fantastic that I kind of would have forgotten how long it took to get there if I wasn’t recounting it for everyone multiple times. Ha. About a third of our class participated, and honestly, I didn’t even have the longest journey. Three people flew in from Australia and New Zealand… heck, one alumni smuggled herself in from Moscow by way of Istanbul. And it was so amazing to just jump back into conversations with them like barely any time had passed.

And maybe thanks to a very ironically ill-fated attempt by rich people to get up and close with a century-old disaster... as annoying as the start of my journey was, I kept coming back to the thought of, well, it could be worse…

Like wow, think about how we really take for granted the efforts that have made mass transit safe. Airplane accidents now average one out of 1.6 million flights a year – down from about 1 in every 25,000 back in 1959. In general, any type of mass passenger transit – plane, rail, even passenger ship – has gotten much safer.

I actually went down a Wikipedia rabbit hole to see what maritime fatalities were like through the ages  and did you know that in the year of the Titanic, 1912, two other accidents racked up major death counts?

The Koombana and the 150 people aboard it disappeared in a tropical cyclone off the coast of Australia in March of that year.

In Japan, a ship called the Kiche Maru was said to have foundered off the coast of Honshu in September that year and lost all 1000 of its passengers. It was allegedly barely reported because it was just one of hundreds of naval calamities due to a particularly horrifying typhoon.

So really, as uncomfortable as all that waiting around was, I’m sure it’s much more comfortable than say, clinging to an iceberg...

See you next time!