Going Home

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McCarran International Airport, Las Vegas, NV
Terminal 3
Gate D-17
Saturday, February 24, 2018
I go many places but in reality there is only one place want to go. I look at pictures constantly - they fill my Instagram feed - and, though I am not prone to envy, I am envious. Of the photographer because he or she was there (behind the camera but there nonetheless). Of every pedestrian, every person, photographed because (whether they like it or not) they were there. In the place I long to be.

Next month, a month from today in fact, I'll hop a plane for London then another to Copenhagen. Two weeks of running, walking, and writing my way around Scandinavia. It'll be my second visit to Copenhagen and Gothenburg, but my first in both Oslo and Bergen. My travel bucket list grows longer daily - Croatia, the Netherlands, Malta, Faroe Islands, Iceland, Finland, Estonia, Romania, Poland... I can go on and on. I picked up a Conde Nast Traveler magazine at the airport in Austin, the Italy issue apparently, flipped a couple pages, and actually thought "Italy...? Yes, definitely." I never had a glimmer of interest in Italy. Until that moment. You might be a travel junkie if...

Why do I travel to other places? Why not just to my city, my soul mate? Simple. Because it's who I am, the travel. It also helps me answer the question posed by skeptical others, the question only I seem to know the answer to. If I've only been there, how can I be so sure? So I try other places. I keep an open-mind. It's good to see, good to learn, good to know. Not because maybe there's someplace better. Nope. Because travel is fun and I'm curious. I want to see the world and understand it better.

One day, though, I will wait for a plane, much like I am now, but instead of being bound for Austin, I will be going home. To the only place (in my adulthood) where even a window-less hotel room has felt more like home that any house or apartment in any city or town ever has. And when I get there, I'll stay and live - be a lucky pedestrian in some random photograph. Until I travel again. Because wherever home is, there I shall be. And I love to travel, be out in the world, run, see things from my Instagram feed in person.

Then one lucky day, my home base will change, shift a couple time zones east, and a few latitude lines North and I will finally be able to say - when asked where I'm going in some random airport in some random place in the world - that I am going home. To Stockholm.

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