You Can't Tickle Yourself

 

There are things you can do when you travel alone. 

You can sloth in a lounge chair for six hours. 

You can eat dinner at 3:00, 4:00, 8:00, or not at all.

You can walk barefoot on hot rocks and not have to carry a kid who doesn't like it.

You can skip the explaining, rationalizing, planning ... just basically all the talking.

Best of all, you can dwell on thoughts.

As you dwell, you can stare off into space, letting your eyes "sit back, relax, and enjoy the show." You can't do that when you're traveling with someone. They'll ask what's wrong. They may clap in your face and say "Woo hoo, are you here with me?"

You can meander and wander--be it physically across strange crystallized sands, velvet ocean floors, or slabs of flat rock bespeckled with holes housing tiny creatures. Or be it mentally through the dark and brilliant thoughts of past, present, and future. This is the essence of travel.

Paul Theoux says in Fresh Air Fiend, "Whatever else travel is, it is also an occasion to dream and remember. You sit in an alien landscape and you are visited by all the people who have been awful to you. You have nightmares in strange beds. You recall episodes that you have not thought of for years, and but for that noise from the street or that powerful odor of jasmine you might have forgotten."

 

There are things you cannot do when you travel alone.

You cannot laugh out loud.

You cannot hold hands.

You cannot take a good picture of yourself that doesn't scream SELFIE!

You cannot put sunscreen on your back.
You cannot tickle yourself.

Best of all, you cannot sit around only dwelling on your thoughts. 

When your mom wants to take a 10 mile hike, you do. When your kids want to snorkel, horseback ride, paddle board, zip line, get ice cream all in the first hour of vacation, you do. When you have to figure out the words for "shaken milk does not a milkshake make" in French, you do. Or you try. 

Travel companions get you up and out. You have to be accountable to someone. With kids, you have to account for someone. If your companions are outgoing, you get into conversations with strangers. If your companions are adventurers, you get talked into jumping off boats into watery shark abodes. If your companions are foodies, you taste, lick, slurp, guzzle the night away. If your companions are retro, camp, or nostalgic, you stay in 70s motels and ride rickety roller coasters.

You push your boundaries. You get uncomfortable. You try new things. You succeed. You are alive! This is also the essence of travel.

Paul Theroux says in Fresh Air Fiend: "Travel, its very motion, ought to suggest hope. Despair is the armchair; it is indifference and glazed, incurious eyes."

And these experiences forced by the social rules of being with people (Rule #1 = No sitting around dwelling on your thoughts; let's go do something!), are the very things you remember, dream about, dwell on when you get to travel alone again.