Travellin’ on the Cheap

My vacation plans are getting less and less ambitious. First I thought it would be great to go to Europe. But I really can’t afford it. Then I thought it would be cool to go to San Francisco. But I really can’t afford that either. So I think I’m just going to stay local, or at least travel by car. I think I’ll take day trips to the beach, maybe an overnight trip to Virginia, maybe go up to New England, maybe explore more of the outer boroughs of New York City. Maybe I’ll spend a day or two relaxing with a book in the reading room of the New York Public Library. Maybe I’ll see a matinee next Wednesday. I don’t know.

See, travelling is great — the world is full of places and people and things to see. But I’d like to wait until I can do it without having to increase my credit card debt. And anyway, it’s not like I’ll die without having been anywhere. I lived in Japan for three years. I’ve been to Hong Kong, Thailand, Australia. I’ve been to Paris and Amsterdam. I’ve been to Israel. I spent an entire summer travelling around the U.K. and the Republic of Ireland. I’ve been to Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, the District of Columbia, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, California, and Hawaii.

It just seems better right now to work on paying off my current debt instead of increasing it.

Wow, this is kind of funny! I’m writing as if I need to defend my decision from people who will disagree with me. Like I don’t even think I’m entitled to have my own views or make my own decisions. That says a lot about my view of myself, doesn’t it. Hi, folks! I’m the guy whose father never took him seriously until very recently! Yay.

My tour through the Great Books continues. I finished the Iliad last week. I skipped the Odyssey because I read it in high school, and anyway, after the Iliad I was tired of reading blank verse. I just finished reading Aeschylus’s trilogy of Greek tragic plays, the Oresteia — Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides — but they really didn’t do much for me. So I think I’m going to skip the rest of the ancient Greek dramatists for now — Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes — and read Herodotus’s Histories. Maybe I’ll like those.

I’m not sure if the point is to like all of this, or just to have new experiences and “fill the well,” as Julia Cameron would say.

Anyway, I guess it’s just like travelling. Only much, much cheaper.
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