Staying home

I wrote this for the Sunday Age many moons ago. It seems more fitting than ever.

Having spent a few odd years working as a guidebook author, I don’t get around much any more. Kids, pets and debts are more than enough to keep my feet firmly on the ground. Usually in mismatched socks, out by the clothesline, pegging out the washing.

I might, while I’m out there, notice the odd plane glinting on the horizon. I might even wonder where that plane is headed, but that’s about it. That’s about as close as I get to real travel.       

Not that I’m complaining. Quite the opposite. I love not travelling. It’s liberating. There are so many things about travel that I just don’t miss. And the things I do miss I can relive. My memories tend to satisfy any lingering wanderlust. Plus I can rearrange them any way I like, shifting location and adding whole new plotlines at will.

In my head, I’m always flitting off to exotica, without any of the real-world horrors that beset modern travellers. Such as airlines.

This may sound a little odd to some, maybe even a little sad, but there’s a lot to be said for imaginary travel. For a start, the fictitious planes I fly on never fall out of the sky. There’s always plenty of legroom, no influenza, a distinct lack of cavity searches and it doesn’t cost a cent. For someone like me, with not much spare time to speak of and even less spare money, it’s the only way to travel. 

I know this to be true because I actually tried a little real-world travel recently – extreme travel, even – a family road trip down the coast. It confirmed my theory that faux travel is the way to go.

Just planning the family road trip made me want to crawl back into that first-class window seat in my head. The logistics alone were proof that holidays are best taken retrospectively.

Memories are great that way. They tend to favour the Hollywood edit. Give them enough time and they’ll artfully remove all the tedious, drawn-out bits, leaving you with a glorious, and completely unrealistic, highlights package.

Distance is just as beguiling that way. The yawning gaps between A and B haunted me in my former life. On the road and under a tight deadline, distance was simply something that got in the way and made my job difficult. There were times when I envied office workers. I spent days, weeks even, fantasising about being trapped in a workstation staring at a screen. I dreamed of air-conditioning. 

I thought the distances would disappear when I stopped travelling. Of course they haven’t. Now that I’m a non-traveller, the distance is still there. Only now, it seems far more picturesque. Now, it adds a little grandeur to my memories. It overlooks the mundane details and encourages my imagination to plaster over all those imperfections. Most of which tended to involve mad taxi drivers, even madder fellow travellers, dodgy food and all-night vigils over toilet bowls.

Having tossed so many scenes of bleary-eyed, travel-induced horror onto the cutting-room floor, I can now be a travel bore with the best of them. If someone tells me they’re off to some far-flung tropical tourist haunt, I can lie wistfully and tell them all about how great the place is. How they’ll love every minute of it. Just like I did.         

And if ever my artfully edited memories need freshening up, if my archival footage starts to look a little dated, I can always pluck a few images from other people’s travels.

Just the other day, I overheard a woman saying she was off to cycle the Loire Valley.

“Well, aren’t we all,” I thought.

While the woman started complaining about how much her travel insurance cost and how much packing she still had to do, I was already parking my bike outside the Château d’Azay-le-Rideau, fresh baguette and bottle of something nice under one arm. And I was home in time to put the bins out.      

As for the recent family road trip, it hasn’t been packaged yet.

In a few years, it might just be a brief and blissful jaunt. But right now, with the Hollywood reimagining still a long way off, it’s pretty much unwatchable.

But just so you know, getting away was a nightmare. En route was torture. Arriving was even worse. If I hadn’t spent half the trip floating over a rainforest in a hot-air balloon (while, physically at least, steering a chaos-strewn family wagon down a congested highway), I wouldn’t have made it out of there alive.

I would have curled up in a culvert and imagined myself home. Call me an armchair traveller if you like, but I don’t actually own an armchair. Although I am happy to imagine one …