Flightster
Keeping Still, Staying Put and Staying Together
- by Jools Stone
- on September 16th, 2010
- 16 Comments
On Trying to Keep Still: seems like an unlikely title for a travel book doesn’t it? It’s one of my favourites. British travel writer and novelist Jenny Diski published this collection of essays a few years ago. She’s a beguiling bundle of contradictions: an apparently adventurous travel writer who journeys to the Antarctic and circumnavigates the USA alone by train, who always seems to encounter interesting characters on the road, but who actually prefers her own quiet company in a cosy house full of books. She devotes half the book to saying so, while hiding away in her isolated Somerset cottage, with a few high-minded references to equally reclusive French essayist Michel de Montaigne tossed in for good measure.
Taking it slow
Perhaps one of the many reasons I enjoy reading her is that she reminds me of my partner in certain ways. And this made me reflect on our – quite different – attitudes to travel. She once spent an entire afternoon happily watching a caravan of ants transfer some breadcrumbs across our Tuscan holiday apartment balcony. On the same holiday I recall being disappointed to not make it down to explore Grotto del Vento, some ‘wind caves’ with impressive stalagmites and stalactites about 20 kilometres away from Barga, the gorgeous village we stayed in. This being rural Italy (and neither of us being drivers) the local bus service didn’t stretch that far, so after weighing up the price of a return taxi we decided to give it a miss. She was delighted with this outcome – more time to sit around reading and relaxing! Now I am fond of the whole ‘slow travel’ thing myself, but still…
If this sofa could blog
Ironically since I have started travel blogging I have never been more static. This has its benefits: I get to spend more time with my beloved hermit for one. Plus even though I’ve done very little flesh and blood socialising lately, I’ve never felt more sociable. I spend my days meeting ‘n’ tweeting people right across the globe while wedded to my living room sofa in Edinburgh. I soak up all their roving adventures while tentatively planning my own.
Poor Theroux
I’ll be inter-railing my way across the Balkans next month, travelling solo for the first time. As I plan my trip I can’t help thinking about Paul Theroux. The book which made his name is The Great Railway Bazaar. Published in 1975, it documents his trip by train from London to Japan and back via Russia. The writer retraced his steps 30 years later with Ghost Train to the Eastern Star. One of the most striking parts of this book, which got quite a drubbing on publication, is the part where he discloses the fact that while he was travelling for the book his marriage was breaking down. His wife had begged him not to go and once he’d left she took up with another man, who swiftly moved in with her into the marital home while he was shuttling his way through the Khyber Pass. Theroux explains how this had tainted the entire trip and subsequently bled into his work. It’s quite a disarming moment coming from such a detached writer. Hopefully I don’t have to worry about the same thing happening to me, but it’s still the longest stretch apart we’ll have spent for many years, so forgive my sentimentality.
Wiring home
My own little journey is much less ambitious of course but I plan to cover a fair bit of ground, staying for no more than 2 days in each city. I know I’m sure to meet some interesting people en route and in the evenings I’ll have my laptop for company at least. This unassuming, dusty little white slab has a very important function. The laptop will be my lifeline: my connection with home, as well as with my new global network of travel blogging buddies.
Keeping it together
Travel is often depicted as a solo pursuit, so much so that it’s become a well-worn cliche: the gap year adventurer on a search to find themselves is easy to send up. But what about travelling couples? Nothing new about these of course, but the rise of travel blogging highlights the fact that many entrepreneurial couples hit the road together intending to live on income from their blogs, or at least for their blogging to offset the money they’ve saved for the trip. I’ll confess to being a little envious of their ‘have cake and eat it’ lifestyle.
The solution I’ve hit upon is to scratch my itchy travel feet with a succession of short, sharp trips. Dashing off for a week at a time every 2 months or so, or as frequently as money allows. My personal paradox is that when I’m home I’ll be mostly pining for travel while continually reading and writing about it, and when I’m away I know I’ll be pining for home even more.
How about you? What’s your solution? How do you balance domestic bliss with your yen for that long and winding road?
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Just finished Ghost Train to the Eastern Star a few nights ago! Theroux is my favorite travel writer, hands down. There’s something about his tone. His diction is so illustrious and vibrant. He’s deep and philosophical, a bit of a cynic, and has an encyclopedic knowledge of world history and culture. Hell of a storyteller if you ask me!
Enjoy your trip across the Balkans. My first train ride was a 22.5 hour trip from Istanbul to Bucharest. Two early morning border crossings, a short stop in Bulgaria, but no dining or social cars. It was a new and wild kind of travel, confining but almost forcefully introspective. I wrote a lot. And stared at the passing landscape.
Rockin’ post.
Thanks Alan, yeah, I love Theroux too and don’t understand why Ghost Train got panned. I think he’s excellent at capturing a national psyche without resorting to stereotyping. He can seem a bit arrogant at times – the part where he interrupts a girl opposite him who happens to be reading Railway Bazaar and asks her what she thought of it made me chuckle – but hey, he practically invented modern travel writing so he’s entitled to be opinionated!
I may make it as far as Istanbul myself, there was major flooding on the line earlier this year though so it might not be fixed in time. I’m looking forward to some long, introspective journeys to get me into that Diski/Theroux mindset! I’m rubbish at describing landscapes though, it’s the thing I admire most in good travel writers.
Great post on a very relevant topic (and one that few touch on). I guess it’s something that we all have to consider, even though our solutions may be very different. While I’m finding that as time goes on I am getting more offers of press trips and could probably spend more than half of the year on the road, it’s not the life I want.
My wife works hard at her job (one that she enjoys) and I would rather be at home with her, saving up my own earnings so that when we do travel we do it together. Yes I have taken a few trips without her, but these are the exception and are not accepted lightly.
Will that obstruct my chances of reaches the upper echelons of travel bloggers? Undoubtedly. Will it result in my travel experiences (and life in between those trips) being richer? I believe so. It’s a compromise that works for me. I accept though that others may have very good reasons for choosing another path. Like I say, we’re all different.
Thanks Andy, I think that’s a really lovely way to approach it actually. Did your wife come with you on your recent Balkan tour then? I will probably persuade my fiance to accompany me on a few trips, just not the ones where I’ll be moving around a lot, as I know it’s not the type of travel she enjoys. Next year though for our honeymoon we plan to cross the US on Amtrak (NYC-Chicago-San Francisco) the best of both world’s hopefully!
The Balkans trip was a big step forward for me. Yes, I travelled with my wife, and more than that I didn’t bring a laptop and only went online to check messages/tweets twice during whole trip. I scribbled a few notes on bits of scrap paper to help me remember a couple of ideas for future posts, but other than that it was a 100% holiday – bliss!
We’ll be away for 6 weeks over Christmas in central America and I plan to do the same again. It will be a contrast from the same time last year where I took my netbook to SE Asia, and everywhere we stayed I logged on, uploaded pictures and blog posts and kept up my social media activity. So the blog traffic will drop – but the quality of the trip (for both of us) will be so much better. And when we get home? I’ll have tons to write about.
I do appreciate that my approach works for me because I have no sponsors on my site, and would be unsustainable if I had a responsibility to them to maintain web traffic.
Jools – I’m exactly the same writing, thinking about and planning travel when I’m home and then missing my husband when I’m travelling. There isn’t a simple solution. Even when we travel together, I’m not good company because I have to spend a couple of hours a day online just to keep up with my editorial duties and then when we’re out and about, I’m thinking about gathering material for the blog.
Well that’s the thing, every place you go and every sight/museum/visitor attraction/hotel you experience is a possible blog post or twitpic isn’t it? I expect your blogs keep you much busier than my little one does me, but the danger of turning your spouse into a ‘blogging widow’ is very real!
When I was still working as a sports commentator, I got to travel solo quite a bit. I would usually leave my colleagues behind to explore the town or city where we were on the free times I get. On these solo trips, my mind would always actively file away the names and places I would love to bring wife and son to when we do go on holidays. I enjoy my solo “expeditions” but enjoy it more if I travel w/ the family. Although spats arise along the way (normal in any family), we do enjoy our own company.
Thanks Michael, the ‘file for later’ strategy is a good one. Maybe you could post about some of your ‘family hiking spats’ on your blog too, they could make for quite entertaining reading I think!
My last two years of travel have been spent in one way or another with my now ex-girlfriend. It’s great to see the world with not only your best friend, but the person you love. Interesting too it was always a challenge for me to balance general socializing, spending quality time with my girlfriend, seeing sites, and keeping up the blog by taking pictures, brainstorming, writing, tweeting, and what have you. I still don’t know why everything ended as it did, but I still think traveling as a couple has many advantages that a solo traveler doesn’t get. Having that friendship and comfort along your side through challenging times is worth so much as you’re out experiencing new places.
I agree with that Matt and hope to persuade mine to accompany me more and more. I met up with an Australian friend of mine years ago who was just back from a round the world trip. He saw some amazing stuff and did some life-changing things, but I always remember him saying to me ‘Yeah, it was great of course, but I had no one to share it with.’ Boy do those words ring in my head as I plan this trip! Plus when things don’t always go to plan you can always rely on each other and bout the other one up. Thank God for skype and facebook is all I can say!
Wonderful post Jools. I couldn’t help but smile when I read that your partner spent an afternoon watching ants and was completely content. They are fascinating. We also feel the same way that you do, whenever we are travelling we yearn for home and whenever we are home we can’t wait to get back on the road. So taking it slow is a very good solution.
Thanks guys. You were one of those ‘roving couples’ I was thinking about jealously when I wrote it actually. From where I am, you seem to be living the dream. You’re doing what you love, seeing the world, earning enough to keep on going and most importantly doing it all together! Did one of you ever have to convince the other to opt for that life at any point though? And yeah, ants are fascinating little beggars it’s true!
My partner loves travelling which means that the two of us can share our passion for it. I do tend to favour museums and cultural hot-spots a bit more than she does (and she prefers markets and shopping more than I do!) but we’ve built our own routine around each other’s preferences and are comfortable with that.
My work does make me travel a lot and so I do spend an inordinate amount of time on the road solo. I do miss having her around but I also know that it’s not like she could accompany me everywhere – she has a job of her own after all and I’m working rather than living it up in whichever destination I happen to be. The worst is when I have to spend a weekend away as that’s when the loneliness sets in.
I know that she feels the same way and it is a little hard to reconcile the “It’s my job” argument with the “I miss you” one particularly when the office schedules trips that conflict with birthdays or anniversaries.
Still, it could be worse I suppose …
Hi Jools,
Thanks for posting this up, it was interesting to hear how you feel about leaving someone behind, but I was hoping to read more about what it’s like to travel when you’re in a couple – a whole other kettle of fish! While you will have to wait for the book to know the true dynamics of mine and Harald’s relationship, it’s safe to say that travelling for 24hours a day for 4 months with the same person is hard, and a huge test of not only your own tolerance levels but also theirs. I think what made our journey different was that we were working. We had a job to do and it’s very hard to maintain a professional demeanour with someone when they see you at your best, your worst, your most frustrated, when you’re heaving over a toilet bowl, and your most whimsical – travelling brings that out in all of us. But I think as long as you agree to disagree on certain things or at least agree to have two days a week on your own to do your own thing, then you should be alright.
It ain’t easy though, that’s for sure!!! x
Thanks both
@Unexpected You mentioned the lonely weekends and there was a good post recently about the loneliness of travel which said that the evenings were the worst. When I went solo to Paris recently I found this to be true too. Consequently I found it very hard to stay in one bar for more than one drink and ended up pounding the streets restlessly looking for another bar in which I’d probably spend no more than 30 minutes in anyway!
@Monisha To be honest we haven’t really done much extended travel together, a combination of practical reasons (working full time until recently) and it appealing to her less. But it’s interesting to hear about your experiences on that front, I’m looking forward to the book anyway as you know, but now I’m really intrigued and want to read it even more!