No Schedule, No Plan
I’ve always been a traveller. Not full time or all the time, but every ten years or so my feet start itching and I want to quit the job, flat and place I’m in and head off somewhere entirely new.
This comes from Fergie, someone I used to work with in real life. We sometimes snuck off for forbidden pints at lunchtime, and she was the one person in the office I could talk to about escape. We were both heavily depressed, I think, but at least we’d both seen other parts of the world. You could hold that inside yourself when listening to the thrum-thrum of the photocopier and the glubble-glubble of the watercooler.
Apparently her itch to “head off” happens every ten years. I expect that’s natural and actually true of everyone, only it takes someone like Fergie — someone who sees that the bars of the cage are largely imaginary — to actually act on it.
Today she posted a nice long rumination on her various escapes, starting with an impromptu trip to America in the ’90s:
Exciting, terrifying, I almost chickened out at the airport. Once there, I adored the freedom. No schedule, no plan. A couple of days in New York then heading to the Greyhound station with my backpack and seeing where the buses went. This was back in pre-internet days when you couldn’t spend hours and days poring over websites to see where you might want to go, which buses go there, when they leave and arrive. You couldn’t scrutinise online maps and book accommodation. Instead, you’d have a Lonely Planet guidebook – mine likely covered the entire USA – and a long distance phone number to call a hostel ahead.
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About Robert Wringham
Robert Wringham is the editor of New Escapologist. He also writes books and articles. Read more at wringham.co.uk