A Trip to Be Taken
After two false starts and not making space for it to take root, I learned that some journeys return when we’re ready.
It wasn’t that I didn’t think about it. I did. At least two or three different times in the weeks and days leading up to my departure. But each time it floated across my consciousness, I promised myself I’d check on it later – after dinner, after the gym, first thing in the morning.
But as can happen with those little things we procrastinate on, it fell through the cracks completely.
I just never got to it in time.
It hasn’t even been a full week since I put my pen down on Travel is a Journey, and I’m already called to pressure test and practice my own philosophy on intentional travel’s continuity and reach. My words, Tessera Blog 50’s text, feel oddly reassuring and comforting right now as if I was one of their intended recipients all along.
I have come to unapologetically believe travel is anything but episodic. If we treat travel as disconnected blocks of time that we only carve out – in contrast instead of complement to – our everyday lives, we end up doing ourselves such a gross and great disservice.
The more however, we shape and accept travel as part of our own connective tissue – not only between beats of joy and discovery – but between the parts of ourselves that travel awakens, we molt and expand.
It is almost as if every trip we take marks that deep down place inside of us like growth rings inside a tree trunk. Each trip moving distinctly but around the last, circling as it does our sense of self, purpose and essence.
And so it is for this reason that I believe travel deserves to occupy a seat alongside us on this journey we call life. The more we invite travel to move with us as a trusted companion, mentor and confidante, the more travel becomes both mirror and muse, documentarian and director.
Even if we never log another mile, travel’s transformative power is always accessible and regenerative. It took an intentional grounding from fate, the universe but more likely self-sabotaging procrastination to help me see that beyond any shadow of a doubt.
The Friday morning of the day I was supposed to depart for Auckland, I felt calm and confident as I maneuvered United’s online check-in process. I was smartly packed. I had almost checked off everything from my over-achiever’s overly aggressive to-do list. I was still tracking to squeeze in a final boxing session, planned just so, to get oxygen-rich blood pumping through my body before I sentenced it to 18 hours of cramped up flying.
Then, the text box I so casually and dismissively feared might pop up during a usually predictable check-in, took over the screen of my iPhone.
I won’t pretend to know what it said word for word as all I saw, mocking in jest back at me was, “Dammit Amanda. You amateur. You really should have checked on that visa…”
In the moments that followed, I braced for and absorbed a most incredible range of emotions – shame, embarrassment, anger and disappointment.
But most of all?
Relief.
It was true. I had rushed and phoned in the prep and planning for this trip. I had the foresight to push it off once, fearing it was coming up too soon, but I resisted every last plea from that wise but meek voice inside of me. She kept signaling I wasn’t ready or right to take off this time either.
Now it seemed she got to say, I told you so.
Truth be told, I had been sprinting through complete and utter, self-inflicted burn-out to this exact reckoning. I had no choice but to accept with grace and self-compassion the events that brought me face to face with such an absurd travel calamity. I owned it. But most of all, I acknowledged how and why I got here.
And within minutes, I shifted mood and mode from self-pity and self-loathing to salvage and damage control. I cancelled my first night’s hotel with forty-seven minutes to spare before the pricey penalty clock buzzed. As I clicked “cancel the reservation,” the Type-A problem solver in me beamed just the slightest, littlest bit knowing that in spite of everything going on, I hadn’t been reduced to a shrinking hot mess of panic and paralysis.
Given all I’ve come to believe and work through, it was almost too easy to swallow that it wasn’t my time to see New Zealand. Not yet anyway.
I thought about how I got here. Since returning home from Malta in December, I had invested every waking minute I had into a sprawling and spiraling initiative designed to expand The Untethered Traveler. As I cleared one hurdle after the other, I refused to yield when I came up against something I didn’t know how to handle. Rather than give up, pay someone else to solve it for me, or worse yet, fold and quit, I committed to finding a way to make whatever it was at the time just happen.
Every day, then, it seemed I was learning a tiny bit more about how to stretch my capabilities, be accountable to an exacting outcome and trust myself to put in the work required to make my dream a reality. Exhausted as I was, I knew I had found that sought-after, often elusive zone. I also sensed that in a few short months, I was learning a lifetime’s worth about who I was and who I wasn’t.
It was from this sacred place that my trip to New Zealand quietly fell apart. It never had the space it needed to fully take root inside of me.
I should have known something was off. I should have recognized I was simply too preoccupied with my other project to shape out any semblance of a meaningful, taste-led itinerary. Never mind I didn’t take the time to research and get the visa, I never tried to understand why New Zealand kept calling me in the first place.
By dangling New Zealand out as a carrot to incent my own performance, I had diminished the role it could play in delivering what I was really longing for – a refilling of my creative cup and a reconnection to the world around me. And yet, I insisted on positioning it as a trophy to claim on other side of an always shifting finish line.
From this place I had disregarded not only the significance of a dialed in why, I had distorted beyond recognition the frequencies that move me. I hurriedly and halfheartedly put together – without Taste, my compass and without intention – an agenda that was destined to drain me. Had things not worked out the way they did, I would have taken everyone else’s version of an ideal Kiwi vacation – except my own.
So when I “called it” from the sofa that morning, my shoulders did drop. As I added up the waste, the non-refundable tickets and change fees and admitted it wasn’t all that bad, I did exhale, deeply. And when I realized I was actually getting a third go-round to get New Zealand right? I lowered my head in deep and genuine gratitude.
Then I let things play out. I resisted the urge to do anything but listen and feel my way to what was next.
Was it even New Zealand?
How had I fallen into the same trap I spend so much time writing about? Maybe this wasn’t my kind of place? I am not an outdoorsy adventurer type. I don’t snorkel, kayak, camp. I just don’t. Instead, I love to soak up the beauty and awe of nature through windows, art and a once-in-a-blue-moon hike up a foggy Slovenian mountain.
In the days that passed, the less I tried to analyze everything and the more I surrendered to the confusion, the stronger the call back to New Zealand felt.
But this time it came from a place I knew I couldn’t ignore.
Since calling off my trip, I hadn’t stopped thinking about how I was missing out on the Chef’s Journey Menu at Tala, an intimate Samoan restaurant. Tala means story in Samoan and everything about their origin story had me excited to try Samoan cuisine – and try it here. This was the most heartbreaking reservation I had to cancel as I sensed and still do, this was a meal I could very well remember forever.
There were other meals too that would simply have to wait their turn – at Ahi, Alma and Pici in Auckland. Wineries on Waiheke Island I was anxious to try would also join the list for some day – in particular the family run Te Motu and the beachfront Man O’ War. The list kept growing. There was this cozy little spot in Christchurch, Gatherings, I had taken an instant liking to. And then of course, there was a whole foodie city to explore in Wellington.
I still feel in the pit of my stomach how devastated I was to give up my hard-to-get seat on the TranzAlpine train which perfectly combined – my kind of way – the best of taste and nature. I could sit in a luxury train car and through the train’s panoramic windows, take in sweeping views of New Zealand’s Southern Alps all while feasting on local cuisine and wine pairings.
There was suddenly and absolutely no doubt. I had to make this journey.
The trip was back on.
This time I shaped my own itinerary between reservations at Tala on the North Island and a once-in-a-lifetime rail ride on the South. I was going to do New Zealand the only way I knew how – following the incontestable direction of Taste, my compass.
But I still couldn’t help feeling disappointed and confused with myself for how much I let phantom judgment, social pressure and stress influence the trip I had cancelled. And what of my rookie move assuming the visa would if anything be instantly processed? And how had I come to veer so far away from my experience, values and deeply held beliefs?
Because, I think, if travel shows us one thing persistently, it reminds us that behind acts great and small, we are nothing if not human.
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