In February 2014, my now-fiancé and I quit our corporate jobs to travel full-time. While we had been dreaming of and talking about our escape for months, it wasn’t until the week before we actually gave notice that we decided where we would do our traveling. We wanted to travel for at least six months to one year, and we wanted to minimize our ocean-hopping to keep costs down, so we knew that we were looking for a large destination where we could travel primarily overland. After ruling out two of the more obvious choices due to previous travel (he had backpacked through Europe in 2005, and we had backpacked through Southeast Asia together in 2008), we narrowed our list down to Southern and Eastern Africa, South America, and the United States.
I just couldn’t get excited about the last option. There are plenty of places I would love to visit within the United States (the Grand Canyon, just to get started), but a cross-country road trip just didn’t seem like enough. To me, going on a grand adventure unequivocally meant leaving my native country.
We eventually settled on Africa, and our trip was amazing – but I wonder whether I should have been so quick to dismiss domestic travel. The United States is home to plenty of amazing sights, even more than the national parks and big cities that are found on the usual tourist circuit. For example, we spent the last week visiting friends in Omaha. While our friends were at work during the day, we toured some of the city’s highlights: the Joslyn Art Museum, the Henry Doorly Zoo, the Bob Kerrey Pedestrian Bridge spanning the Missouri River, and a self-guided walking tour of public art in downtown Omaha. We were surprised and delighted with the city. We expected to have fun visiting our friends; we hadn’t expected to have such an enjoyable time exploring the city.
Traveling domestically has some distinct advantages over traveling internationally. Most obviously, you’re (almost) never going to have that fish-out-of-water feeling while traveling in your own country. The language is the same, the currency is the same, the process for obtaining accommodation is the same. Also important: the rules of the road are the same. A few years ago, we rented a car and drove to Montreal over a long weekend. Everything was going fine until we crossed into Québec. Then, all of a sudden, the signs were all in French … and the speed limit was posted in kilometers per hour, whereas our American-made rental car only showed our speed in miles per hour. Finding ourselves amongst fast-moving traffic with only a vague idea of where we were going and whether we were obeying posted traffic laws was slightly disconcerting.
Of course, for some people (myself included) the fish-out-of-water feeling is one of the thrills of travel. I’ll never forget disembarking a plane in Beijing Capital International Airport and being suddenly surrounded by nothing but Chinese characters. What have we done? I wondered, unsure how we were ever going to find ground transportation or an ATM. That sense of disorientation – and the ensuing triumph of finding a taxi, or a hotel, or ordering lunch – is part of the fun. While I will (probably) never choose domestic travel over international travel, assuming all other variables are equal, my recent trip to Omaha reminded me that there are plenty of adventures to be had in my own country.
Image credit: open road by Bruce Fingerhood; feet on Bob Kerrey Bridge author’s own