Getting There

Editor's Pick Award

Our Editors awarded this travel blog entry for providing relevant information that may be useful and inspiring for other travelers.

My friend Nils once wrote an interesting sentence within one of his fiction pieces: “All trips begin before they begin and end before they end.” When did my trip to Mexico begin? Well before I stepped foot on Mexican soil, for sure. Perhaps it started when I started working at Realtravel. Reading of other people’s adventures jump-started my imagination and helped me clarify my priorities. Namely, for this Winter, anyway, wanting to be somewhere tropical and swim in the ocean. Just one of those ‘relaxation’ vacations that I hadn’t done before. I have also gotten more and more enthralled with the idea of swimming with dolphins. And so I set out to find the right place for me, preferably out of the country. I could only be gone about 5 days, so a short flight was necessary. Mexico became the clear choice. After some research, Puerto Vallarta seemed like it had Mexican old-world charm along with tourist accessibility; I wasn’t up for anything too arduous, and there was no time to learn Spanish.

My friend and I dove into the process: did some research, booked flights on one of our credit cards, booked the hotels on the other, and in another 3 short weeks we’d be boarding a plane. And so the vacation begins before it begins. Shopping for bathing suits. An excuse for a new dress. A new camera thumb drive with lots of space, plenty of sunscreen, vitamins, ziplock bags so I could take lotion on the plane, all in all a humbling process to call attention to how high-maintenance I’ve become in my "old age." I used to grab my passport and go. Basic necessities can be found along the way--- toothbrush, socks, etc—and clothes can be washed on the road, right? I’ve outgrown that, apparently, me with my $30 lotions and immune-system-enhancing herbs. 

Our flight was scheduled to leave at 1am. As soon as my suitcase hit the pavement in front of my apartment the travel fever descended upon me, that feeling of possibility and seeing something you’ve never seen before, peoples' lives intersecting, sitting in a small tin cylinder and being flung in what feels like slow-motion but isn't through the frigid troposphere to find a whole new climate enveloping you as you disembark from the small, curved, airplane door. I walked through my San Francisco neighborhood dragging my wheely-suitcases behind me, for once immune to the chill of the fog or the drunken barflies spitting out their desperate pleas and insults.  

There’s travel that is all about the in between, being in transit wherever you are and being both at home and at your destination wherever you find yourself. This was not that kind of trip. This was the kind of trip where being on the tropical beach was the goal, and getting there just an annoying delay of reaching it. Or so I thought. But then, once in the airport, I remembered that I love traveling. Every minute of it. Especially internationally.  Airports are portals where time doesn’t exist, travelers’ consciousness still ticking on several hours out of sync with the numbers the clock tells on the airport wall, setting watches forward or back as they land in one time zone, often heading towards another. Tumbling forward in time. Emerging elsewhere. And the languages. And the stories. Anyone with an ounce of imagination could never be bored. Look around you! Guess where those people are from, why they’re headed where they’re headed, what circumstances brought them to this day. Travel companions and solo travelers, families and flight attendants, all of it so interesting. 

And then there's how often I've traveled alone, and how nice it is to be with someone else. Someone to sleep on during a long flight, to watch your bags in the terminal while you visit the hurricane-zone Texas restroom, to bother and poke, complain and exlaim to, to practice clumsy Spanish on, to amuse yourselves with hijinks. And it's nice to have a witness, too, since I'm quite accident prone! And I was planning on hurtling through space as least once.