Happy lives are lived on a couch. It is hard to find anything as sweet in this world as earplugs, airplane mode, and a cup of hot, black liquid tranquility in the morning. All this, on a couch whose cushions you’ve made thoroughly yours, and the world feels manageable. From this position it feels easy to recollect memories sweetly, filling in the fleeting details with more life than life ever actually contained. From here, the hardest thing about writing is not lying. It’s one of the better problems to have.
The lie I feel most drawn to write is that I’m a natural-born traveler, for whom travel comes easy and remarkably. Whenever I travel, however, I’m quickly reminded this is not the case. The truth is no matter how little sleep, how strong the drugs, how nice the pillows, I’m cursed to never be able to sleep on an airplane; I can road trip no more than two hours before I begin to feel like my coccyx is cracking; I struggle to understand the simplest of accents and the only other language I know is Latin, of which I’ve yet to find a speaker. It is far easier to be here, on the old familiar couch and trade new sites, new cultures for their far cheaper, far more accessible substitute: books.
I’ve loved books for a long time. My favorite book as a child was Around the World in 80 Days. I desperately wanted to be like the eccentric Phileas Fogg—mysterious, cunning, and forever calm even in the harshest of predicaments. I wanted to travel like he did—on a whim, unflinchingly figuring out each problem as it came, stumbling upon amazing sites, people, and stories at every turn. I suppose I was like most children.
Growing up, like most people, I let the childish dreams rest. Instead, I continued receiving secondhand nourishment from books. Like a mouse in a banquet hall, I ate better than most. I sat around John Muir’s campfire in the great Alaskan Wilderness, wandered London with Bram Stoker, then questioned what it is to be a Londoner with Zadie Smith. Throughout it all I sat back; the hard work done for me by minds greater than mine. Even as a carless college student I traveled more mentally, and with better company, than most ever will.
Suddenly, however, I graduated. I found myself let loose into the world with no trail in front of me, nothing to restrict me, nothing to guide me. No syllabus of books for a menu, I had to decide where to find my own meals. Books were tried and true, but one can only read so much before the stories begin to feel condemning, and life on the couch feels a great hypocrisy.
It was then that I was revisited by the memory of Phileas Fogg, not like Scrooge and his ghosts, but like a childhood friend stopping in town, come to see what you’ve made of yourself. I’ve no doubt that there are some who can read, watch, listen, without any nagging need to try and imitate, and I envy them, but I am not one of them. I booked a flight to London for cheap with the miles I had saved up from college.
The intervening two weeks were uneventful, filled primarily with wistful daydreams of life on the run, meeting new and exciting people, solving mysteries with the help of a beautiful foreign girl and the stray German Shepherd we adopted, basic travel fantasies. But during the 48 hours before my flight, I was sick to my guts from the stress. Beyond what was printed on the tickets I had no idea what my plans were, though that wasn’t the true source of the worry. The thing that kept my stomach in a knot was whether I could really live the lifestyle I wanted so badly as a child. The airports, accents, streets, flavors (or flavours), sayings, etiquettes, currency, these would all be different.
My one comfort was that I knew the people must be the same, or at least incredibly similar. A Londoner’s first kiss surely couldn’t feel all that different from my first kiss. No, people over there are awkward too, and they worry over little things, and they struggle to say what they mean, probably even more so cause of those funny accents, and they also get heartache from breakups, and heartburn from greasy burgers, and they probably all fumbled their first kiss too. This was no great comfort, but it was comfort enough.
I arrived at SLC Airport way too early, as Google suggested, to ease travel anxiety. The help was imperceptible. My flight was delayed due to storm Landon which cut my ninety-minute layover in Newark down to twenty minutes. As we flew, I slowly watched my layover shrink into nothingness. As I made peace with the process of traveling (listened to ASMR and took deep breaths) I received a text informing me United was holding my flight for fifteen minutes. I gathered my overpacked carry-on and personal item and booked it, arriving at the gate just as it was being closed, in a fashion fit for a movie.
“You’re Josh?” I managed to exhale a yes.
“Well, you better get on this flight.” This seemed like wise advice to me, dear United gatekeeper.
I collapsed into a surprisingly comfortable seat next to a sweet woman who said, in a thick Polish accent, “ah, so yuur the one we’ve been waiting for.” I was embarrassed, but too out of breath to express it.
I landed at Heathrow six hours later, the sun just rising over London. Since I got to the plane late all overhead storage was full, so my carry-on with my phone charger had been placed up at the front of the plane, meaning I landed in London with a dead phone. I didn’t panic, I resolved to just take my time and charge my phone after landing. This thought was as soothing as it was false.
There are, of course, different outlets in the U.K. as everyone knows, but I forgot. The shops were all closed in Heathrow, leaving me stranded, phoneless. All I knew was I had about three hours to make it to a hotel called the Radisson Red for my Covid test. Heathrow, however, is a little city in itself, with a slurry of buses with routes one must instinctively know to get anywhere. I must have asked at least eight people for directions, but my inability to understand accents was made substantially worse by the fact I had been awake near twenty hours. I finally made it to the bus station where I could pay eight quid (I had no idea how much a quid was) to take a bus to the Radisson Red.
There I found a USB plug-in which, over the course of two hours gave me about a seven-percent charge. During these two hours, the worries took on the traits of a light mushroom trip, manifesting themselves in carpets and raindrops. I thought then, the worries overwhelming, travel ought to be left on the page, left to those with stronger necks that don’t knot up at the prospect of a foreign train station. At this point, my head was as overstuffed with worry as my carry-on was with too many t-shirts (one does not need t-shirts in London in February). I didn’t have much time to indulge these worries though, I still had to find a place to stay.
I found a well-reviewed hostel on Hostelworld for a good price. I memorized the route as well as a person who had been up twenty-two hours could and made my way over two buses to the tube. Now, a map of London’s underground train system is enough to make anyone overwhelmed but I, with all that had just got me here, was certain I had met my death. More ASMR, more deep breaths. I transferred from train to train to train successfully, finally getting off at the stop my phone (again dead) had told me.
From here I roamed the streets where the hostel should be for almost an hour with a heavy backpack and overstuffed carry-on in hand. The stress came back, this time to my gut, and, despite common epithets, my gut didn’t give me much direction. Eventually, I stepped into a café I had passed five times and asked the owner if he could point me to Wombat’s Hostel. The owner, a kind man named Pama, who was as extroverted as I was exhausted (a less than desirable pairing), said, “Wombat’s? My friend, you’ve made it. You’re not even a block away. Now, my friend, what kind of sandwich can I get you?” I was sat down at a table before I knew what was happening, a basil, tomato, something or another sandwich in hand, and my first cup of English Breakfast tea.
“Good, yea?”
“Yes Pama, very good.”
…
The check-in was relatively painless, or at least I was completely numb at this point. I hit the bed right at my twenty-fourth hour awake, a thin hostel mattress that felt like heaven. Despite the mumbling black lady in the corner bed across from me, mumbling spells in something sounding like a mixture of pig-Latin and Swahili, I fell asleep easy.
A few hours later I woke up, the old black lady now gone, and three young, beautiful black girls were there instead. Before I was even conscious, they asked my plans for the night, I told them I had none but I’d be happy to tag along with them. With that I fell back asleep. Upon waking up again they and all their stuff was gone, and the old black lady was back. I was certain that either some voodoo witchcraft was afoot, or sleep deprivation had taken a far greater toll on me than I thought.
Luckily, I found them at the hostel bar. They had moved rooms due to the other lady and convinced me to move with them. Suddenly, rather than the windowless basement room I was in, I moved to the fourth floor of the hostel with a four-meter bay window for a wall, and a view of the London skyline with sights of the Shard, the Gherkin, and Tower Bridge.
The girls were wild and lived life at a pace I could hardly keep up with. They were fun, flirtatious, and wide-eyed. Everyonewas their friend even if they didn’t know it yet, but most caught on quickly. That night began with tequila shots and ended with thirteen drunk travelers on a 2am trek to Shortage, one of London’s four nightlife districts. We never made it, and only with the help of a German girl named Izzy did we make it back to Wombat’s.
In the morning we’d go see the sights, I’d sneak off to one of the many free London museums for a couple hours, and at night we’d reconvene. We’d play drinking games at the little pubs before going off to the London clubs. Every night was overwhelming, but in ways that excited rather than frightened me. Travel, at its best, seems to require you live life day by day. That mentality swings one’s mindset from “seize the day” to “survive the day” constantly, and though it’s taxing, it’s enlivening, and though stressful, its addicting. You learn quickly what is worth your worry. When traveling, nothing about life feels manageable, yet of the hundred problems that worried me when I arrived at Heathrow, I’d estimate that ninety-seven were resolved with nothing more than sleep and patience.
In time I got better at understanding accents, and I even learned how to navigate the Tube without needing a map. Every place I ended up in London I met people to talk with. I talked about fútball and football, Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, Brexit and American foreign relations, but only a little. Most of the time people talked about places they wanted to travel, the awkward office romance they were privy to, relationship troubles, relationship successes, the inconvenient train delay that day, the little things.
My time in London turned out better than I could have ever planned. A romance began that would last throughout my time abroad, I made lifelong friends, contacts around the globe, all within my first week traveling. The stress never went fully away, yet life was amazing, as good as it had ever been. It felt like living in a novel.
