Here is a brief anecdote I read in Bordeaux airport this summer, whilst waiting for my flight back to the UK.
This is taken from the final few pages of Bill Bryson's fantastic book Neither Here Nor There, which had accompanied me on my adventures. Here the author reflects on the closure of his trip around Europe:
"And I was, I admit, ready to go. I missed my family and the comfortable familiarities of home. I was tired of the daily drudgery of keeping myself fed and bedded, tired of trains and buses, tired...of my own dull company. How many times in recent days had I sat trapped on buses or trains listening to my idly prattling mind and wished that I could just get up and walk out on myself?
At the same time, I had a quite irrational urge to keep going. There is something about the momentum of travelling that makes you want to just keep moving, to never stop."
I can relate to Bill's funny old paradox here, and can draw a few parallels of experience. I too was pretty fed up of entertaining myself on long coach journeys. I did miss my family. And yet I had a nagging impulse to keep travelling, having gotten used to this perpetual motion of a life. Bill then goes on to complete his epic with a Coke. I opted for a watery vending machine hot chocolate.
Ah, the euphoria of change, the ecstacy of exhaustion, a wearied head, sickly amber aeroplane lighting, the exhilaration of levitating in an airborne metal cylinder. Onwards and upwards.
Bryson, B 1991, Neither Here Nor There, Transworld Publishers, London.
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