Only not really. Doing a lot of travelling over the holidays, visiting friends. I just got back from seeing friends in Toronto, where my magic DFTBA shirt detected more Nerdfighters! I definitely didn’t plan on the first real snowfall hitting southern Ontario and practically locking down the city, but fun and karaoke were to be had. On the train on the way back, I had a lot of time to think about travel and distance.
See, I’m a pedestrian. I’m working on learning how to drive, but I’ve no particular designs on owning a car anytime soon. I’m patient enough that public transit can usually get me where I need to go. Otherwise, I walk. A few kilometers a day is good for you, I’m sure. But one of the results of the pedestrian lifestyle is that I don’t travel very much outside of town. Growing up poor meant that it wasn’t much of an option anyway. Travel and accommodations cost money, and that’s money that needs to be spent on groceries. At least, that’s the idea. But I think there’s a sense in which the imagination becomes stunted. Even something just outside of town seems a million miles away, and the nearest city might as well be the moon. But that was before we all grew up.
I don’t really travel for places, I travel for people. they’re what I’m interested in. And as I get older, more people I care about move out of town, and I meet more people that I care about who are from other cities. I don’t want them to always have to visit me, so I’m learning to go and visit them. The bus isn’t that expensive, and the province is smaller than I imagine. I made my first long trip ever in the summer, where I met tons of Nerdfighters at Vidcon in California, and I’m headed to PAX East in April. The more I travel, the more I get used to the mindset, being constantly in motion, figuring out where and when things are, and when to ask directions and when to just read the signs. It’s a new world, and one that I’m really excited about.
I think I’m going to be heading to Toronto a lot more often in the foreseeable future, and when I first thought about the prospect of that, it made me really anxious. It seemed really far, and every trip there seemed like it needed to be a major production, with an itinerary, a plan, a backup plan. It would be so much work that I’d never done before, and I was pretty intimidated. But as with anything else, once you’ve done it it gets easier, and while it’s two hours there on the bus, that’s not that long and I haven’t read every book in the world so I can always find things to do.
Either my imagination is getting bigger, or the world is getting smaller. Either way, I like it.