March 8, 2021 2:43AM…It will be nearly a year now that this pandemic has been around. It wasn’t “official” in our household until we were finally settled into our first house in late March 2020. What madness! Trying to sell a condo AND buy a house during a shutdown! But that was our shared reality. In the competitive Seattle real estate market, this was probably our best (and only?) chance (ever). Otherwise we’d still be looking to this very day or drowning in way more debt than we had hoped.
It also took me nearly year to admit to myself that I enjoyed traveling. There was something essential, earth-shakingly essential now missing in my life. Maybe the realization that I could catch a lethal virus and die alone in a hospital bed helped put things into focus. Or maybe it was because no amount of travel book reading, YouTube videos, or listening to Rick Steves’ podcasts could fill that void.
Still not willing to go as far as saying I am “passionate about traveling” though, “love” is probably the farthest I am willing to go and even then very hesitantly. Passion, to me, is having half a dozen trip itineraries in their back pocket ready to go when international travel restrictions are lifted. Love is daydreaming about your first meal when you land or what mornings sound like in a far off place.
To be honest, I’ve struggled since coming out of the travel closet nearly a decade ago. There is the slight pang of shame when a coworker asks what I will be doing for those three weeks of vacation. Trying to downplay that we will be traveling up to Tuscany from Rome and then along the French Riviera to Paris so as not to sound too bougie is challenging at times. Or to embarrassingly explain that I like to know, at the very least, how to say “hello” and “thank you” in whatever country we will be visiting (we are self-proclaimed ambassadors of sorts for America) when I get caught red-handed in the lunchroom with my color-coded foreign phrase index cards.
But we aren’t anything special. Just your average interracial mid-forties gay couple living in a “suburb” of Seattle. No extravagant budgets or champagne dreams here (we aren’t those kind of gays, even if we tried). In fact, we try to do everything on the cheap and with what little time we have.
So why only start blogging now? Well maybe because the Pandemic was that unavoidable push that I needed to be flung fully out of the travel closet.
Post Script. 8.13.2025 A word came to mind as I was lying in the dentist chair getting my teeth cleaned–aficionado. According to Merriam-Webster, “a person who likes, knows about, and appreciates a usually fervently pursued interest or activity”. I think it fits just right; not travel dilettantes but also not obsessed fanatics, a nice comfortable middle-of-the-road term to describe us.
