For me, the excitement of traveling has always been linked to an excessive willingness to sacrifice comforts along the way. This determination to experience hardship usually begins in the preliminary packing phase of trip preparations. I shove everything I need into a bag, decide the bag is too bulky, and convince myself that my trip will be ruined if I insist on bringing more than the barest of essentials with me (no way will my adventure be ruined by the misguided notion that I need both a toothbrush AND a hairbrush on this trip! Only one may stay!), as if backpacking through Europe is akin to fleeing the bolshevik revolution.
Inevitably, while I sacrifice an essential item, I will also have packed multiples of an item, or one bulky and oddly specific item, which I would only need in the rarest of cases. The result of this is an awkward conversation with my travel partners,
about 8 hours in to the journey, when I have to explain why I made a
conscious decision to leave my shampoo/towel/pajamas/clothes* behind, but I still brought my recorder/stapler/entire jewelry box with me. Will I regret packing three pairs of footwear, three kinds of tylenol, and all the bandaids I own, but only one pair of shorts when I arrive in Madrid?
Maybe. But in my mind, being in Europe will be such a grand adventure that having only one pair of shorts to wear for a 30 day stretch will hardly make a difference in the grand scheme of things (but having 3 different kinds of a headache could).
*That was an awkwardly memorable instance that did NOT make me any friends.
In order to lighten my pack, I left behind an article of clothing either on purpose or accidentally at every hostel for the first two weeks of El Camino. Unfortunately, I purposefully tossed my merino wool long johns at Viana because I thought that Spain was getting warmer ... Wrong! It snowed the next week in Madrid.
ReplyDeleteDad