Mountains with a cooler of melted ice and
spoiled food, blisters from wearing
inappropriate shoes while hiking, and a
tent full of water from a storm that
cropped up out of nowhere. Adding insult
to injury, someone broke into our car and
stole our backpacks while we were
sleeping. In an even worse twist of fate,
the robber stole my boyfriend’s iPod and
not mine, leading to a joke I’m still living
down about my apparent bad taste in
music.
Our next trip wasn’t much better. We
decided to try cruising down to Nogales, a
mid-sized Mexican town just across the
international border. Not only was the
romantic getaway thwarted by an extra
friend who’d begged us to take him along,
but my car’s engine blew up on the
highway just minutes from the border and
resulted in me having to hire a very
expensive tow-truck service to take all
three of us back home. We returned having
not set foot in Mexico.
Other mini-trips suffered similar fates: our
trip to the Grand Canyon ended in even
worse blisters and getting stuck in a dust
storm two miles into the canyon; our trip
to San Diego resulted in a grumpy cop and
an enormously expensive speeding ticket
for driving seven miles over the speed
limit; and our trip to Bisbee, an old mining
town, ended in an existential conversation
over what we were doing with our lives.
What’s the big life lesson I learned, aside
from investing in good band-aids and never
using a 15-year-old car to drive to Mexico?
Make your travel resolution about the
journey, not the destination. Even with all
the shenanigans that comprised that year, I
am happy to say I kept my New Year’s
resolution (and my boyfriend!) and in the
spirit of happy endings, that boyfriend
actually became my husband. And yes,
we’re still traveling.
Take 2008, for instance. It was my first
year of graduate school in Arizona, and I
had absolutely no money whatsoever. I’d
saved up for months for the cross-country
move and to pay for my first semester of
classes. I was swamped with the myriad of
responsibilities that make graduate school
unappealing to most people and I was
living on tortillas and cheese because I
couldn’t afford to buy lunch at the café on
campus.
One night over pasta, I revealed my
resolution to travel more to my new
boyfriend. His eyes became large and he
nodded toward a bowl of ramen, which
had become his equivalent of my daily
quesadilla. “Really?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, matter-of-factly. In a world
of broken resolutions and promises unmet,
there was no way I was going to let my
yearly travel pledge befall the same fate as
my “eat less carbs” one, which clearly had
not worked out so well. We decided that,
since we couldn’t take a six-month trek to
Asia, we’d opt for some mini-trips around
town.
Our first trip went about as well as my
carb-free diet; and when I say it didn’t go
so well, I mean it was so bad that we came
home from camping in the Chiricahua
ike so many people, I
always sit down on the
first day of January and
write out a list of New
Year’s resolutions I am
absolutely convinced I am going to keep
and which I will no doubt break almost
immediately. As it stands, there is only one
resolution that I have never broken no
matter how much my life has tried to
dictate otherwise:
travel more
. Recently,
this resolution has been fairly easy to fulfill
because it’s pretty much an essential part
of being a travel writer; but in the past, it
wasn't always so easy.
L
KRISTIN WINET
She is an award-winning travel writer,
blogger, and photographer. Her work, which
has been featured both online and in print,
covers culture, cuisine, accommodation, and
experiential travel. Check out her website at
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