What Travel Means to Me: Destination

By Larry Nodarse

I love to travel. Really. I mean really really really. To me, there is nothing more important. Well, okay, there’s breathing, sleeping, eating and drinking. And sex. But really, besides all those necessary-to-survive things, travel is #1 for me. It’s even more important to me than love. I mean, if I had to choose between settling down for a lifetime of bliss with a soul mate, or being able to travel, I would choose travel. I wouldn’t even have to think twice about it. There is nothing more important to me than seeing as much of this world as I can, before I die. I don’t believe in reincarnation, so this life is the one chance I’ve got.

I’m the kind of person who always counts his blessings. Besides my most important blessing, good health, the other two blessings that I’m constantly thankful for are travel-related.
I feel thankful that I was born in a point in history where traveling around the world has become a possible thing. This didn’t happen until the end of the 19th century, when the great steamers were able to cross the oceans, carrying their passengers in smooth, reliable comfort, and delivering them to other lands. Then, once on land again, the newly-developed railway systems could transport travelers efficaciously across terra firma. If I had been born 200, 400, 800 years ago or more, I would have been lucky to have seen more of the world than what lay 100 miles from my birthplace.
Even today, I am lucky to do that.

The majority of humanity does not have the opportunity to travel internationally. Which brings me to my other blessing: being a citizen of a rich country where one doesn’t need a travel visa to go virtually everywhere.

Thanks to internet social networks, I have forged friendships with people from all over the world. I have friends in Peru, Chile, South Africa, Pakistan, Turkey, Thailand, the list goes on and on. Most of these friends have a desire to see the world, but can’t, because they live in “poor” countries and need visas. They would love to visit me, but can’t get the visa, so they tell me that I will have to go and visit them.

In such countries as theirs, only the rich can travel. None of my friends are poor in those countries. They are educated people, with middle-class jobs, just like me. But because my country is the USA, I, by no means an affluent man, can go virtually wherever I want, whereas they are relegated to neighboring, fellow third-world countries. I find that accident of birth to be very unfair.

In this world, to travel, you must basically be either born in North America, Western Europe or Japan, or if you are from an under-developed nation, you must be born to wealth. Well, I wasn’t born to wealth, but I was born here in the USA, where if I want to travel, I work a little harder, forgo lots of dinners in restaurants, cut back on the shopping, get the time off, reserve a flight, and go. An Algerian guy like me, who has to work and save to travel, can’t do that. Even if visas weren’t an issue, how could his currency hold up against the dollar, the euro, the pound, the yen? A year’s salary in his country would last him maybe two weeks in London.

Yes, I feel very blessed to have been born when and where I was, because ever since I was a child, I have longed to travel.

I grew up in Texas, where the closest state can be very far away. I was raised in the suburbs of Houston. The only place we ever went was to Miami once a year, to visit my maternal grandparents (this allowed me to experience air travel in the 1970s and ’80s, when it was actually a semi-pleasurable and humane experience).

When I was 8, we drove to New Orleans for a family vacation. I was so excited to see another state! Louisiana would be added to Texas and Florida. We drove. And drove. And drove. Texas really is a giant. It took forever to reach the Louisiana border. For-ever.

As long as I live, I’ll never forget the name “Orange, Texas.” It’s the last city before the Louisiana border. I kept asking my mother, “How much longer ’til Louisiana?” and my mother said, “When we get to Orange, then you’ll know that we’re almost in Louisiana.” I’d look out the car window and look for signs that said how many more miles it was to Orange… Orange: 100 miles. Orange: 70 miles. Orange: 30 miles… it was taking forever, and the prospect was killing me. You would have thought we were approaching Tokyo, such was my anticipation. I remember my dad saying, as we passed by one of those signs, “Five more miles to Orange, Larry! Only five miles to Orange!” My heart started beating faster. As we passed through Orange, I was struck by how utterly normal a town it was, but my disappointment didn’t last long, because the next signs were signaling the number of miles to Lake Charles, Louisiana. My excitement grew. A city in another state!
Don’t think that this excitement over something as trite as crossing a state line was due to my only having lived eight years. When I was 20, it was the same deal.

My first two years after high school, I studied at a junior college near my hometown. I would travel with the speech team and compete in college speech tournaments across the state, particularly in the North. We’d stay in motels over the weekend. Sometimes we’d be staying in a dry county, and, after competing in the tournament , we’d have to drive far out of town to buy beer.

I remember how once, we drove north for the longest time, and we started seeing signs that said we were approaching the Oklahoma border. “Oh,” I exclaimed, “lets cross over into Oklahoma!” My friends in the car asked me why I would want to do that. “Because it’s another state! Don’t you guys want to be able to see another state?” I asked. “But it’s Oklahoma,” they said, “we’re not wasting any more gas just so we can cross the border of Oklahoma.”

No offense to Oklahomans, but the true sign of a travel-starved individual is one who thinks of Oklahoma as an exotic destination.

For my third year of college, I wanted a bigger change than Oklahoma or Louisiana could offer, so I transferred to New York University, and had the extreme pleasure of living in Manhattan. How ironic it seemed to me, walking along the Hudson River and seeing another state, New Jersey, right across the water, close enough to swim to.

New York City was a revelation to me. Being surrounded in close proximity by so many people from all around the world, made international travel seem more feasible to me. One of my friends in the NYU dorm was an Italian student from Rome. After graduation, he invited me to visit him there, and stay in his apartment on Piazza San Cosimato, in Trastevere. I took him up on the offer, waited on tables in Rockefeller Center, saved the money, and went.

I won’t go on and on writing about Rome. I’ll save that for another time. But let me just say what a perfect choice the Eternal City was for my first trip to a foreign country. I’m still in awe, 16 years later. In that trip I also visited Florence and Pisa, but it is Rome that impacted me in a way I will never overcome. It made me realize, on my first day, upon my first Vespa ride around the city, that traveling abroad was not so implausible a thing to do (as many Americans must feel , when you think of how few of us have a passport).

After Italy, I went to England and Ireland the following year, followed by Spain and Portugal the year after that, and so on and so forth, to the point where now I have visited over 20 countries and probably over 100 cities; I’ve lost count. All I know is that, upon looking back on my adult life, I see many ways in that my life has been a big disappointment, with major shortcomings on a personal level and on a professional level. I’m not where I want to be in life, but I’m very pleased and even proud of where I’ve been. The traveling that I’ve done is the one aspect of my life that I think I have done right, the one part that I wouldn’t change a bit. My travels have enriched me immeasurably. I’m so grateful, grateful for the blessing of having been able to travel.

And one last thing: can we just change the word, “Travel”? Because traveling in itself sucks! I mean the actual getting to the destination. It is, after all, the bulk of the travel in “Travel.” I’ve grown to dread airports… getting to them, stressing about getting to them early enough, the lines, the security, taking off your shoes…. And now, thanks to the Christmas Day “Fruit of the Boom bomber”, we may have to start wearing our underwear on the outside of our clothes when flying. The leg room seems to diminish on a monthly basis, the food and drink they serve you more Spartan. It just sucks.

We don’t really travel on titanic, trans-Atlantic ocean liners anymore, making a leisurely, stress-free crossing. We fly, and flying with every year becomes more and severe. If we are not flying, we are driving. I don’t like driving any distance longer than a few miles. If we are not flying or driving, we’re on a bus. Unless it’s a luxury bus, the trip is not pleasant. If we are not flying or driving or sitting on a bus, we are sitting on a train. Trains are nice and comfy and fast and efficient in Europe and Asia, but everywhere else, they have a tendency to be, well, maddening. But even when it is a sleek, fast train, you still have handle your luggage, wait in line, catch the train…

I am not whiner. I gladly and thankfully go through the travel so that I can get to the destination. THAT’S the word. Destination. I think “Travel” should be changed to “Destination.” That’s what travel is really all about, isn’t it? The destination.

That’s what I was thinking the last time that I was at The Traveler’s Bookcase.

The Traveler’s Bookcase is my favorite bookshop in L.A., where I currently live. It’s part of an endangered species: the mom ‘n pop bookshop, where the owners are hands-on, and know all their books. That little shop is stuffed with books about travel, but the last time I was there, I thought to myself that the books there really aren’t about travel. They’re about destination. Books on China, Laos, Argentina, Colombia, Mali, Botswana, Estonia, Spain, Russia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, India, Sri Lanka, Australia… these are all destinations.

Who enjoys reading about how to get from the Incheon airport to the center of downtown Seoul? That’s travel. It’s Seoul that I enjoy reading about, its architecture, its arts scene, its restaurants, its nightlife, its customs, not the logistics of traveling there. Logistics of travel? That’s necessary reading. Korean culture? That’s pleasure reading.

The Traveler’s Bookcase should be renamed, “The Destination Bookcase,” but the owners will probably be smart and not take my advice. It’s likely just me who thinks this way. And I do because I’m really not a traveler. I’m a destinationer.