Getting Ready

Once a "theme" or focus of travel has been selected, spend some time exploring locally. If someone were coming to your town or city looking for your "theme" what would they find, where would they go, how would they get there, who would they talk with?

Using "tea" as the theme I recently spent time in the coffee/tea/hot chocolate aisles of the major grocery stores in my city, the local health food stores and the specialty coffee shops checking the variety of teas available in my area. I also looked for "tea" in the specialty aisles where imported items are shelved and made a note of web sites listed on the boxes of teas that I found interesting. Text on the boxes can also be used to enhance the pages of your traveler scrapbook, so buy the product, brew the tea and make a note of your reaction. Add this as a journal entry to your scrapbook.

Visit the web sites listed on the packages and download information and quotes to supplement the travel notes from your trip journaling. The resources from the web sites may also provide contacts and locations to visit.

Shopping trips and virtual visits to companies that sell tea help you prepare for the journey that will eventually fill your scrapbook.

Destination Overload? Can't Pick Just One?

You have a blank notebook in hand, but when it comes to writing down a destination there are just too many places you want to see. How do you decide where you want to go? And how will you filter all the information that is going to start showing up in your life? Before you give up and decide it is easier to stay where you are, take a few days to focus on what you want to see that you can't find in your home environment. What interests do you have-hobbies, membership in an interational organization, preferred method of travel, pilgrimage walks, historical events, a beverage (tea, coffee, beer, wine, chocolate) or a style of cooking, home furnishings, museums-the list is endless and very personal.

Leave page one, the destination page, blank for now and write "I really want to see and experience___________________, when I travel on this trip." On a page at the back of your notebook, write the heading-"Things I would like to see and do someday". And, take about 10 minutes to write a list, without stopping, of all of the things that you can think of. Then put the pen down and put the list aside for about a half hour. When you come back to it, read each entry and when one seems to pop out at you, or causes some excitement circle it. Now pick out one and put that on page two of your notebook. Do not remove your list, since you might want to refer to it for another trip.

This activity can be the focus of your trip, the common thread you can use for all phases of your travel. You might become so interested in this topic that it will become the focus of more than one trip, or you may take a trip for each of the interests on your list.

For example: I chose "TEA" as my interest for my next destination.Here are TEA related topics I would like to learn more about:

1. Tea estates-how is tea grown, harvested, processed, marketed, where are they in the world.
2. History of TEA as a beverage
3. TEA pots, cups, caddies-where made, can I visit a factory, a museum of tea accessories
4. TEA as a meal-what is served, how is it cooked/prepared
5. TEA ceremonies-where can I take part, can I learn how to perform one
6. TEA tasting-
7. Auctions for TEA purchases by companies selling the leaves
8. Conferences/ seminars/ trade shows
9. Major and speciality tea producers and marketers
10. What publications are available for TEA

Once I have a topic and have listed some information I would like to know about the subject, information will start to show up that I had overlooked before. As it does, look for a common location in all of the information and this will help in deciding on the "Destination" you write on page one of your notebook.

And finally, what information do you currently have-books, publications, people at home and abroad that you can use for additional resources for your upcoming trip. By now you should have a destination listed on page one of your notebook. Congratulations! You have taken the first step of you journey.

"Once you commit to something risky and bold, life unfolds with increasing richness and wonder."

Peter Heller; Hell and Highwater; page 14.

Destinations listed-Now What?

So, what do you do now that you have a list of places you would like to visit? And how in the world can one get there when there is no money, no time, and so many obligations are taking up what time is available.

Hold on. This is part of the journey, the preparation. With the list of destinations as a work list, the next steps are to find out as much as you can about the place you want to visit, your first trip. Look over the list and put a check mark next to any of the places that seem to "jump out" at you or to cause just a little shiver of anticipation. This is the ONE. This is where to start building the foundation that will turn the travel dream into reality!

Keep the other places on the list, in fact keep the list. The rest of the desitnations are for the next voyages. Once you go and return home, keep your suitcase handy because you will be packing it again!

Find a clean page in your notebook and in large letters, use a black marker here, put the name of the destination at the top, add quotation marks around it, you want this as visible as possible. Also dog ear, put a post-it-note or a paper clip on this page so you find it as soon as you open the notebook.

Now, get a map, an encyclopedia, a web page and find the destination, this is where you will be going. Start listing questions about the place, just keep writing as fast as you can without trying to find the answers. When you run out of questions or get writer's cramp, then go back and read what it is you want to know right now about where in the world you want to travel.

Lost for questions? Here are a few to get the curious mind started?
What other countries, cities are around the destination?
Are there mountains, deserts, rivers, oceans?
Is it north or south of the equater?
Do I know anyone from that area?
Why did this place appeal to me?
What do I want to see here?
What do I already know about this place?

Your turn, fill the whole page with questions, but DO NOT answer them now. The answers will start to come to you from places you never expected. What will begin to happen is from now on, you are going to find this destination appearing quite often. You will start to hear people talking about it, you will find it in the newspapers and magazines you read and you will hear it mentioned in conversations around you. It's as if the destination has become a magnet.

When this happens listen, watch, read-your questions will start having answers, they will find you. Write them down in your notebook. By focusing on your destination, you have taken the first steps on your journey.

Destinations-Travel Genie Grants Three Wishes

Where in the world would you go if time, money, obligations were not a problem? Do you have a wish list of places you want to see "someday". If you do, get it out and look at it. If you don't, sit right down when you finish reading this blog and make a list. You can't get to those destinations on your list if you don't know where you want to go.

One more suggestion-don't write that list on a piece of paper. Instead get a spiral notebook or three ring binder and put that list on the first page. Set up the list with destinations on the left hand side of the page, then make column for date you put it on the list, another column for a target date to start traveling (remember this is a "wish list" at this time, so don't let your current world end the project now-put a target date down and not one 10 years from now).
Then a final column-date trip completed!

Travel Destinations

Destination---Date listed------Travel Date ------End of Trip

__________________________________________________________________________________

1. Silk road Uzbekistan ---6/24/00 -----9/14/01 -------10/01/01
2. Uganda, Africa------- 5/15/04 ---- 6/21/04 -------7/5/04
3. Train across USA -- 2/12/07 ----9/27/07 ---------????

Make your list as long as you want, if you don't have destinations in mind, then list places you want to see, or things you want to do-attend Chelsea flower show in London; have tea at the hotel overlooking Lake Louise in Canada; take the hydrafoil on the fjords in Norway-it's your list put it all down.

Over the next posts, I'll show you how to contact the "genie" within you so you can collect those three wishes and start traveling by your target date.

Lilac Bleeding Star and the Travel Scrapbook

In the Balkans, it is said, that if you long for faraway countries and leave your own land and home to find them, you have been born under a "lilac bleeding star". It must have been very bright the night I was born, for I have always wanted to know what was down the road, around the corner, at the next bus or train stop or on the other side of the ocean.
And so I find it hard to understand the fear some people have to cross over their thresholds and explore the world they say they want to see someday. Women, most frequently, are the ones that respond to my travel tales by saying "I could never go on my own, but I do want to travel someday." Well, unless they get moving now, that day may never come. As a nurse working in long term care and residential care facilities, I hear the regrets from those who never got around to acting on their travel dreams. In talking with them, I have learned that they have not developed the basic skills that would give them the confidence to start traveling, to move beyond their immediate community and workplace.
Those basic skills can be learned, and once mastered provide the confidence to start traveling. A course I have taught for a community adult education program, "Travel-Dream to Reality" offered information on discovering what was keeping one at home, how to find the information needed to learn the basic travel skills for that first trip and then to discover why one journey leads to another.
My question at the end of the course? When you are home alone would you rather think about the travels you never got around to for whatever reasons or would you like to open the scrapbooks holding the photographs, the maps, the postcards from all the trips you did take?
I'm reminded of a story a family member of one of the residents I have cared for told me. "My aunt was always taking trips. She told me if she ever had to live in a nursing home, forget the recliner. She wanted an airplane seat with a seatbelt and all her travel scrapbooks next to her bed. Every day, they could get her into the airliner seat, fasten the seatbelt and hand her a scrapbook and she would be content."
Travel scrapbooks and journals were the choices made by the women taking the travel course I was teaching, but one has to move beyond the comfort of their homes to gather the material to document the journey.
Future postings on this blog will offer information on how to fill those travel scrapbooks, how to overcome the fears of traveling and how to prepare for trips lasting just a few hours or for journeys lasting weeks and months.