Today, Travel Came to Me

Today I am a traveler, and I haven't even left home! Lines of locals and tourists alike littered the streets trying to get into a street food fair in downtown Los Angeles. I am seeing new parts of my own city. Who knew we had a food fair? I get to eat food ALL day?! Definitely my kind of day. I think this might be a small slice of heaven. Its almost like an assembly of all these different countries got together to share their fabulous food with me (and a thousand other people). They even gave me a passport! So what if it was just a little ticket to get stamped at each place so I could win something? I got to "travel" through the culinary world all in one afternoon. It was enough to satiate my bug, and my appetite for the day. I guess this whole idea of travel being a state of mind and how you can be a traveler in your own home town is true after all. I drive through downtown Los Angeles all the time and curse the horrid drivers and senseless traffic, but today, that same place turned into a little food sanctuary. Travel really is about new experiences. There are things to be discovered right in my backyard, I just have to find them. And considering that my backyard is currently the only place I can afford to go...I will start looking. Travel and I have now been separated for 3 months, 3 weeks, and 5 days (but who's counting?) so I needed this. I know travel and I will be together again soon, but in effort to prevent a severe travel bug induced meltdown, today travel came to me.

I Will Travel Again...

Stage 3: Affirmations. I will travel again. I will travel again. I will travel again. Now that the void left in my life from lack of traveling has reached a whole new level of huge, I have resorted to positive affirmations. Another stage in this disease and I am trying to cope. Maybe it will help, you know, self-fulfilling prophecy, "The Secret"...whatever. If I imagine myself with my toes in the sand somewhere far away, I will get there. At least I have recently managed to gain some perspective. I had the horror of learning that a colleague (a pre-travel-bug-employment-sabotage colleague of course) had not set foot on a plane in 14 YEARS! Well, you can imagine the scene. Me trying desperately to collect my jaw from the restaurant's tiled floor in a hurried attempt to come back to reality and not overly offend the culprit. No he didn't. His body must have developed some type of antidote to the travel bug. There is no other explanation. Okay, I should be fair. He doesn't have to travel. He doesn't have to like traveling. Evidently, although clearly unfathomable to me, there are many more people like him in this world, and there is nothing wrong with that. It's okay. I am just different. It's okay to have the bug. It's okay to have the bug. It's...Sigh. I will never recover. Now, if only I could find people the same kind of different as me. Moral: I should be able to survive four months no travel if there are people running around unscathed after fourteen years without it! I will travel again...