These Boots Are Made For Travelin'

A new year. A new trip. It’s become my classic combination, akin to wine with cheese or Doritos with M&Ms (trust me, it works). My earlier fascination with travel has grown into a nearly physical need for it. The signs of the craving are now familiar: I’m restless, I peruse travel websites during work, I look at stamps on my passport and reminisce as if they’re old family photos.

I don’t know where this year will take me, but I hope it will be across the Atlantic. In anticipation, I’ve amassed stashes of travel porn: Budget Travel magazine, Rick Steves DVDs, VRBO, and my beloved weekly Kayak travel deals email. While I may look like the same old me, I focus on my potentially awesome versions of me in 2010: the me who hikes through Croatia to see waterfalls! The me who sips Bohemian beer after a day of sightseeing in Prague! The me who watches for giraffe and lion on the plains in South Africa! I salivate at the idea that by year’s end, I might know my way around Salzburg or dicker for prices in a Budapest market or learn basic phrases in Dutch.

I recently read Alain de Botton’s Art of Travel in which he examines why and how we travel. Parts are refreshingly unromantic: I sympathized with the feeling of arriving to a foreign location expecting to find both the city and myself there to be postcard perfect (see above) and feeling let down initially. But the gap between the ideal and the real -- in regards to both the place and myself in the place -- seems the most valuable part. I love the discovery of it all. I travel because I know that the person I’ll be on the return flight will be more enlightened (albeit tired) than the starry-eyed one on the outbound trip, that I’ll have learned more about my world and myself largely due to the gap between my expectations of the trip and the reality of it.

It’s funny -- in a humiliating way -- to remember predictions of my past trips. Upon booking our Paris trip, I fancied I’d become a Parisian Carrie Bradshaw, breezing through streets wearing a dress with a flirty, full skirt (I don’t even own dresses like that!), scarf around my neck, while speaking my few phrases so convincingly that the locals would be shocked -- shocked! -- to learn I wasn’t a native. The reality? I was my usual jeans-clad persona, only the people on the Metro stared so disapprovingly at my boots that I knew they set me apart in a bad way, and I couldn‘t figure out how. In cafes, after I’d stammer my order and a couple niceties in French, I’d wait for the waiter to escape earshot before exclaiming to Jimmy, “I did it!! I ordered us coffees!” And unfailingly, the waiter would return -- not with coffees but with espressos because I ordered the wrong damn thing. Again. Luckily, I had many opportunities to learn to love espresso in Paris. The boot thing really bothered me, though. C’mon, black leather boots! What could be wrong with black leather boots?

Travel changes me. Improves me. Each new place demands humility, an open mind, and a willingness to learn what it has to teach. Paris -- despite its reputation -- taught me to be more polite to strangers, to greet and bid au revior to shop owners and to respect a local language at the cost of my ego and desire to appear effortlessly chic while abroad. Italy taught me to slow down while eating and walking, to stop rushing and start noticing, and in the name of all things holy, to use fresh foods and herbs when I cook. Ireland taught me to cherish ties and time with friends and family. London, like the rest, taught me to ditch my preconceived notions and to accept a place on its terms -- or, as it were, to mind the gap.

So where will this year take me? Which me will I become? What place will offer its own lessons that will forever change me? I don’t know, but I just hope where ever it is, black leather boots will be OK there.