Today's post talks about the building of the heart of a traveller. It's my journey from someone who never left Canada, to someone who impulsively books trips on a whim.
The idea of Wanderous Affair came to me shortly before leaving for my trip to Paris in October of 2017. Something clicked inside of me during that time: the desire to stick to blogging (this was what my passion for writing dictated to me, as opposed to me deciding it for myself), to continue improving upon the photography skills that I had taken up back in high school, and to fill as much of my life with experiencing new places. Having never really travelled out of the country (aside from occasional shopping trips just south of the border to Buffalo) up until my Sweet Sixteen trip to New York City with my mum, I never realized how much I was missing out on. I knew that I loved my trips to visit family up north in Elliot Lake; to Montréal and Ottawa a few times; and to Québec City, but moving beyond Canada's border -- especially across the globe -- stirred something that I honestly never even knew was even possible.
I began to understand the weight that "wanderlust" had; I was infatuated with the desire to travel and scraped up my money (I had never worked prior to starting university) to escape the little village of Brooklin, Ontario and drop myself in cities across the world, never wanting to anchor myself in any particular place.
All of a sudden, one trip had me realizing that all of the places I had fantasized about one day travelling to didn't just have to be "one days". Instead, these became actual, physical trips that I could plan out.
In 2012, after making my way across eight different European countries in two weeks' time, I knew without a doubt that there was something unchangeable that had switched on within me -- I needed to move around, to see the world, to experience new places. I needed to try new foods, meet new people, learn new languages. Most of all, I needed to write it all down on paper and in a blog, and share my stories with both the people who are crazy "Big Magic" believers (like in Liz Gilbert's book) like me, and the people who like to hear about these places without having to leave the comfort of their own country, or even their house.
Unfortunately though, after that whirlwind of travel-induced happiness in my senior year of high school, I settled back into a routine of staying relatively put. It was a reasonable decision on my part, since I was now working toward completing my university degree, but that didn't mean that I still didn't wish to be traversing the planet instead of studying psychology textbooks. Even with a focus shift, one can't simply forget how good it feels to travel. You can't just forget what pure bliss feels like. It's like forgetting how it feels to love. Impossible.
When August of 2015 rolled around and a family trip to Indian Shores, Florida was decided on, it wasn't as easy to drown out the desire to travel the second time around. I had waited over three years to finally board a plane and go somewhere far from Toronto, and I wasn't about to wait that long again.
So the next trip was only two years later: I came to the unwavering decision on my twenty-second birthday that I was going to Paris and that was that.
I told my mother that she could come with me if she didn't want me going alone, but that I was going. So she came along with me, her first time to Europe, and loved it.
When we came home from that trip, I was going crazy thinking about my self-proclaimed need to travel. My cousins out west made planning my next trip easy for me when they invited me to Edmonton, and I didn't even hesitate in booking a three week trip to Alberta for the following summer (which was June and July of this year). Then my brother and I went with my mum to Nova Scotia for a week mere days after my plane landed back in Toronto from Edmonton.
Before I went on any of my trips this year though, I had also bought -- on a whim, as it seems I have been doing with my travels recently -- a ticket to Manchester to visit a couple of my friends who live near there. That trip is happening at the end of this month, and I couldn't be more excited to finally have the opportunity to see the United Kingdom.
It's so curious to me how I went from someone who needed to have everything meticulously planned and thought out, who was relatively cautious in what I did, to someone who now books trips on a whim and thinks about the rest later.
I'm a strong believer in the Law of Attraction, and I firmly feel that as long as I set my mind to something that feels right, it'll turn out fine in the end (as long as I have my camera, my luggage, some clothes, and bus fare). It's this passion to keep moving that, as I mentioned in the beginning of this post, sparked the creation of Wanderous Affair to share my stories and my photography. It went from an account to share my excess of travel photos that I didn't want to bother the followers on my personal account with (that is, it was a place for my close friends to see what I was doing while romping around in other countries), to becoming a place for me to share everything that I am experiencing abroad with the world.
Travel has become such an integral part of my existence, that it makes me so happy to be able to share my journey both through written word and photography with you. I hope that you're enjoying it, too. ♥
X,
Emily
*Originally posted on Emulating Emily