Flightster

Three's a Crowd (an AWESOME Crowd)

• by Colin Wright
• on July 13th, 2010
• 1 Comment

There’s a distinct chill in the car, and it’s not coming from the air conditioner (though it is blasting out an arctic-cold breeze like an ice-themed super-villain’s weather machine).

Eye-contact is avoided. Attempts at jokes are made. Laughs are forced. Attention is reassigned to the road, the signs alongside the road, the dust on the dashboard (in that order).

When traveling long-term with other people, these kinds of moments are to be expected, I tell myself, because there are an unbalanced number of personalities being pushed to the extreme – staying up far longer than ever before, drinking a lot more than usual, experiencing rapid changes in climate and diet and accents – and extreme personalities seldom hover near the middle; they’re extremely awesome or extremely…not.

And right now they’re not. Right now we’re recovering from a night of drunken excess. There were new friendships and tenuous existing comraderies and miscommunication-driven misunderstandings and dance-related bets and a few too many shots of tequila…

These things happen, but usually you’re able to go back to your own home and recover in silence, nursing your hangover and laying in the darkness, going over the night and realizing nothing bad really happened, it was all just a confusing jumble of lights and movement and nachos and everything’s fine…or it will be once the headache is gone and the queasy feeling in my stomach has subsided.

Solo Versus Trio

I usually travel alone.

There are lots of reasons for this. For one, I’m a bit of a loner by nature. Sure, I love socializing and networking and building relationships, but what allows me to do this is a whole lot of time alone so that I can recharge my batteries, consolidate what I’ve learned and analyze where I need to go next.

Traveling solo encourages you to meet new people (because there’s no one else to talk to) and one tends to be the ideal number on the road, because generally there are a lot of other ‘ones’ out there looking for the same kind of bite-sized relationship.

When you’re traveling alone, you don’t have to run plans or ideas by anyone else, so if you want to change direction on a whim – even dramatically – it’s a snap to do so. Who’s going to tell you that you can’t? Booya!

Probably the best part of traveling alone, though, is that there is no conflict of personalities or drama. At all. If you come across a potentially explosive situation, well, you just pick up and leave. It’s as easy as that. This kind of simplicity is addictive, and it’s something I definitely miss when I’m traveling with others.

On the other hand, I DO enjoy traveling with others from time to time.

Right now I’m at the beginning of a road trip – zig-zagging across the US – with two other bloggers, Andi from Instigationology and Ash from The Middle Finger Project.

These gals are rad, and I couldn’t have fallen in with a better duo to form a traveling trio for the next month and a half. All three of us are strong personalities, but all have the kind of ‘take life as it comes and roll with the punches’ intensity that makes organic evolution and on-the-fly decision-making easy.

The benefits of traveling in a trio are many, as well.

A pair can be difficult, as both people have the tendency to depend too much on the other, and the relationship can seem like a wall to people on the outside, disallowing a lot of interaction with strangers.

With three people, on the other hand, you don’t get the standard duo assumption (‘oh, they’re in a relationship of some sort…I don’t want to be a third wheel’) and it becomes much easier to integrate more people as you have the ability to balance out your pre-existing (ostensible) third-wheel with one new member, or you have three individuals available to each handle their own new friend or group of new friends, which means that you don’t have as much trouble juggling lots of people, should a big group form.

And if you’re in a group of energetic and dramatic personalities, you do tend to attract large groups.

Traveling Trio Dynamics

Like with any relationship, communication is vital when you’re traveling in a group of any size.

This idea scales well, and though you want to encourage one-on-one relationships, it’s important to keep the group from splintering, as this tends to lead to petty rivalries and drama. As social humans we have the tendency to want to have an ‘Other’ to dislike and fight against, and so long as you can hold the group together against a common Other (boredom? the status quo? terrorists?) you’re usually a bit more protected from in-fighting.

Be careful that you don’t make that the only connection between you, however, or you’ll find that as that common enemy disappears, you’ll have a group of people who feel they don’t have anything else in common and you’ll be back to square one.

What Ash, Andi and I do is focus on the fact that we’ve got common goals and a similar sense of adventure and self-development. Each of us has goals with this trip, and largely they are the same, or close enough that one supports all the others. Making this clear from the get-go allows us to pull each other along if one falls back or stumbles a bit, while at the same time ingraining very solidly the knowledge that each of the others will do the same for us should it come to that.

Be mindful of each other, and if there are little things you can do to make the others comfortable, do them (turning down the radio, adjusting the A/C a bit, etc). Also, don’t be afraid to take some time for yourself and wander off alone for a bit. Just a little bit of silence or time without feeling like you have to keep a conversation going can work wonders for your sanity and stress levels.

We spend a good deal of time (while driving) with our respective headphones on and laptops open, working on our own projects and ignoring each other for hours on end. By doing this we achieve the double-benefit of chipping away at our personal responsibilities and not killing each other in our sleep.

The number of people in your caravan (whether one or eighty) is important, but so long as you keep your end goals in mind and are respectful of each other’s needs, your trip is a lot more likely to be rad than sad.

Colin Wright

Colin Wright is a minimalist, branding expert and serial entrepreneur. While running his blog Exile Lifestyle ,his branding studio Colin Is My Name and his e-publishing business ebookling. Colin travels the world (moving to a new country every 4 months), meeting up with amazing people, giving talks (to audiences ranging from tech industry professionals to college students to Catholic school girls) and hunting down new and interesting experiences.