29 January 2016
Despite the fact that I arrived in New Zealand less than 24 hours ago and have seen only a tiny fraction of Auckland (i.e., one single city block and the inside of a grocery store, which looked distressingly similar to a Costco in the same unsettling way that your living room looks vaguely different when the couch has been moved a few inches), my arrival here feels momentous enough that I want to document it anyways. Aside from the grueling day of air travel itself, which took about 27 hours altogether, the road to get where I am right now – sitting on a twin bed in the converted garage of somebody’s house in Auckland, looking out an opened window onto a ridiculously lush garden neighborhood which, based on what I’m hearing, is absolutely teeming with birds and cicadas – was about four years in the making, and deserves a bit of a background story.
The idea for this trip that I’m taking with my family (one year around the world) began as more of a pipe dream than anything else, as many amazing and seemingly impossible things do.
As a sophomore in high school, I had an opportunity to go with my European History class on a three week trip to Europe, a kind of whirlwind sightseeing tour that would have taken me through most of France, Germany, and Italy. Of course, I was dying to go – and probably would have, had my dad not proposed something else: a year long trip that would take me not just around Europe, but around most of the world; a year to do nothing but travel. All I had to do at the moment was be patient and graduate high school.
Can you imagine how that sounded to me, a 16-year-old infected with an incurable case of the travel bug, who wanted nothing more than to Get Out Of This Damn Town and See The World? It sounded like my wildest dreams come true, is what it sounded like. It sounded like El Dorado. It sounded like Atlantis. It sounded like the fucking Holy Grail.
I didn’t go on the three week trip to Europe.
Over the next four years, this impossible plan that we were slowly breathing life into did indeed grow to almost mythic proportions in the minds of myself and my family. The Trip, as it came to be called (proper noun, very important, very weighty) was the topic around which much of our casual conversation centered:
“Hey, so I was thinking about the trip the other day, and it would be really cool if we – “
“The trip? Which trip?”
“No, The Trip.”
“Ohhhhh, The Trip!”
And so on. The Trip, for me, became the fuel which powered me through high school. After I graduated, when many of my friends went to university, I chose to stay at my local community college – for a variety of reasons, but a large one, of course, being that if I completed my Associate’s degree in a year and a half, I could finish in time for – you guessed it – The Trip. Which is exactly what I did – and glad of it, too, because community college breathed the life back into my love of learning that the American public school system had so patiently and methodically drained, and those three semesters were a gift that left me more passionate, more enthusiastic about life and the world I lived in, more focused, and (hopefully) more equipped to truly make the most of the wonderful opportunity I was being given – that is, to travel.
It is difficult to convey the amount of planning and effort that went into making this trip actually happen, especially since it was so piecemeal. I will say this: for an average American family of three, to whom extravagance is exceedingly foreign (food on the table, etc., but vacations were always more of the pitch-your-own-tent variety than the fly-to-the-Bahamas type), it was daunting. Hint: that’s why it took four years to get here. The short version – work a lot to save money, sell all of your useless shit, give away the shit you can’t sell, store the rest in your aunt and uncle’s basement (thanks, guys), get intimately acquainted with stuffing your entire life into a backpack, and be cool with the idea of working for room and board.
But I digress. It’s time now, in my eyes, to truly live in the moment, to feel relieved that the planning is over and The Trip has begun, and to take a moment to be thankful that I am in fucking New Zealand and there’s cicadas outside my window and tomorrow I’m probably going to go swim in a new part of the Pacific. I am so excited to be able to share all of this with you (whoever happens to be reading this), and I hope to be honest and earnest and candid with everything I experience and write about this year.
To everyone who responded to news of this insane journey with endless enthusiasm and support: thank you.
Here’s to an unforgettable year.
-Sierra
SGBRSH 