A Dozen Trips

Lately I have been thinking of travel in a rather philosophical light. Specifically, I have been trying to better appreciate all the intangible and indirect benefits of travel. See, when I plan to travel today, I spitball the potential value by considering things like the opportunity cost of not working, the cost of the trip, the opportunity to do unique things, and overall quality of time I expect to spend. The "error term", around such an estimate, however, is large, and I wish to find what accounts for it.

When I say I've been thinking of travel lately, what I really mean is that I have been thinking about those best trips - the ones that brought me the most joy, and the ones that have left a lasting impression - and attempted to understand why they were so great. It has been one of the most enjoyable and satisfying mental exercises I have put myself through in a long time. And, despite having thought about them plenty, I think it would be valuable to write it all down somewhere where I can come back to it, as a way to review a little more objectively.

When I think of the best trips I have ever taken, I think of these (listed chronologically):

1) New Mexico / Grand Canyon - ~1988. My parents and I drove to Farmington, New Mexico, to see my aunt, then on to Mesa Verde, Four Corners, The Painted Desert, and the Grand Canyon. It was the latter that, I suspect, was most responsible for the deep affection for the Southwest that I have felt ever since. My grandmother had driven out separately and was camping on the south rim, and the anticipation and excitement of meeting her there, the days spent exploring and the evenings and nights spent around the campground, meeting people, sleeping in her camper van, were formative experiences in my conception of the adventure that travel could possess.

I took other trips with my parents - mostly to Colorado. Those were good, too, but none could match that trip to the Grand Canyon. For years afterwards, my grandmother's coffee table books on the desert and the National Parks were beacons reminding me of that trip, always associating her with those feelings.

2) Steubenville, Ohio - ~1997. As part of a high school church "youth group", I went to Steubenville, Ohio, two summers in a row, for the Catholic Youth Conference at Franciscan University. My first real friendship with a girl tumultuously orbited both trips. The first trip contained so many remarkable memories - staying awake all night on the bus, nights sleeping in the gym, so many new friends, so many genuine people. You can disagree with any religion - and I have scarcely participated in any since - but I found something very special in the earnest friendships I made there - I haven't experienced anything like it since, and I would be lying if I said I didn't miss it.

3) South Dakota / Colorado - 1998. The summer before our senior year I tagged along with Tony's family on vacation. We made friends with two girls at our campground in the Black Hills, climbing rocks and sitting around campfires. But, that was only a warm-up to the minivan full of college girls who offered us candy (an innuendo if ever there was an innuendo, when I was still too oblivious to know one) outside Rocky Mountain National Park. Better yet were the horseback riding, hiking, and meteor showers encountered in the middle of nowhere. Great friendships are built on collections of important moments, and an outsized quantity of Tony and I's came from that trip, and the similar one we took the following year.

4) Colorado / New Mexico - 2002. My friend Reid and I had been talking about visiting colleges in Colorado for practically the entire year I had known him. With scarce premeditation, we finished up our Thursday-night bowling league and drove west in his Miata through the night, arriving in Greeley at sunrise. We wandered the UNC campus before moving on to Fort Collins and Boulder. It was the latter that left me dreaming of a different life than the one I had been leading. That night we wandered the campus and the neighborhoods of a town that I have felt drawn to ever since. The next morning we drove to his grandparents' house in Albuquerque - because, why not? I wished that day never to lose that spirit of spontaneity for travel. Every trip I've taken since carries some wish for surprise and adventure that I've always associated with that trip.

5) Oklahoma City - 2006. Somehow I feel like I am forced to pick between this trip and the trip to Costa Rica, which occurred around the same time. Well, Costa Rica probably had more firsts, and more memorable moments in total, but measured by excitement-per-minute, our long-weekend trip in a rented minivan to Oklahoma City to visit my friend Tony over Super Bowl weekend would be hard to top by any other trip I've ever taken, with the possible exception of Stockholm (see below). Oklahoma City was a "guys weekend" before we were old enough to need to call it anything so lame. We shouted obscenities, walked in front of traffic, head butted, poured pitchers on people, and got kicked out of bars - in the first twenty-four hours. We buried passed-out friends under piles of furniture, cracked beers in bed at night, cracked beers in the shower, cracked beers in bed in the morning, and tried to drive to Austin in the middle of the night. But I also remember sitting on Tony's roof one cool, late morning with a Corona and a lime, head still swimming from the night before as I stared out over the endless suburban tracts, conjuring the band Real Estate from my own wistfulness and ennui, years before they had even formed.

6) Utah - 2008. I couldn't improve upon what I recently wrote about this trip.

7) Helsinki #1 - 2009. It kills me that I feel compelled to choose between this and our trip to Estonia the following weekend. Though Estonia was more exotic, and varied, Helsinki was the prototype for all the exchange student excursions to come, where push came to shove and we saw the best and worst of each other, and created our most indelible memories. The tapas restaurant in the alley before a night out in the club; fifteen people crammed into our ultra-modern hotel room passing bottles of cheap vodka; snowball fights, "dead-whale face," and the trip to Suomenlinna, the eighteenth-century sea fort in the bay. The Scandinavian Winter nights seemed endless, as did the low, gray clouds. And, I can't help but confess that when I look at the pictures from that trip - the pictures of me and my friends, I can read things on their faces that I didn't see then - that I was, likely, too naive, or thick-skinned, to notice.

8) Stockholm - 2009. My friends Krista and Jillian had already gone to Stockholm another weekend, but as Tassilo and I planned our trip, they conspired to return with us. Experience has taught me again and again that the group dynamic is everything on a trip. This trip was wild - the tone of spectacle was set early by our friend Daryl's participation in the magic act at the evening show on the ferry. It was the night of a dozen profound drunken conversations. In Stockholm we visited our favorite professor for an evening of drink, revelry, and faux-sophistication. Back at the hostel, we met fellow American and Australian travelers from Copenhagen, drank Jaegermeister, after which I got very lost - and almost kidnapped - returning from one of Stockholm's most high-profile clubs. But, for some reason, it is the memory of my friend Krista - alternately boisterous and sentimental - that I remember, and being alongside my friends with whom I could laugh so easily, always kind to me as they were, always close and in-the-moment. To me, that trip represents all those fleeting moments, charged with profundity and meaning, spent with friends now long-distant but never forgotten.

9) Norway - 2009. I have spent the past few years advertising southern Utah every chance I get, to anyone who will listen. And yet, when someone asks me where the most amazing place I've ever visited is, the answer comes instantly: Norway. The degree of spectacle is on another level in Norway, and it is everywhere. An inordinate number of the pictures I took there don't look real. Oslo was a peaceful urban paradise, full of incredible parks, fellow travelers, and quiet, friendly locals. Yet, the further we traveled west - Undredal, Voss, Bergen - the more otherworldly and incredible the landscape became. Preikestolen was the only fitting climax. Couchsurfing and friends-of-friends lent the places we stayed warmth and personality. I didn't know what to make of any of it as I watched the sun rise from Tassilo's car in Stockholm after an all-nighter. I still don't know, but I've never stopped wanting to return.

10) Spain / Morocco / Portugal - 2012. Barcelona was even better the second time - Montjuic and Tibidabo, islands of serenity in a city of millions. Girona, Ronda, Sintra were all remarkable - quiet towns in which I could have stayed for weeks, each. And Lisbon is a place I could live forever, eating the same ice cream bars outside the olympic park in the sun. But it was Marrakech that has stayed with me. We were terrified - hesitant to leave our room, but for the friends from the U.K. that we met at our hostel. What was oppressive, then funny, has, in hindsight, become profound - it was Merry and I clinging to each other, relying on each other when we had nobody else to rely on. It seems so powerful to me now because it was so automatic, and because it worked. I know we will always be able to rely on each other.

11) Colorado - 2013. Engagement ring secretly in tow, I committed myself to proposing before we arrived back home. I was first seriously tempted to ask a whopping hour outside of Omaha, driving west, with the sun rising behind us. Nevertheless, I waited until our first night in the Lost Creek backcountry, where I asked Merry at sunset amid an especially remote section of wilderness. Off we went to tremendous weather and a fantastic campsite at Eleven Mile State Park, followed by a cabin in the woods, serene and lovely. If vacations seldom deliver the peace and serenity that I imagine, then this one is the exception to the rule. It also taught me that meaning, like inspiration, is something you can only set the stage for, then step back and wait patiently.

12) Germany / Luxembourg / Austria - 2014. When my friend Tony got stationed in Germany for two years, it became a foregone conclusion a trip was forthcoming. When Merry and I got engaged and set a wedding date, the viable dates for that trip narrowed considerably. I booked a flight to Stuttgart on short notice. When I landed, we didn't so much as stop back at his house before the road trip commenced - Liechtenstein was abandoned during the day - good, we were tired - and wild at night - good, we were ready! Better yet was to reunite with old friends - Tassilo in Munich, then Nath in Vienna. It was the latter city, which I had wanted to visit since I had first seen Before Sunset, which left the strongest impression on me. A late, late night at the club with Nath and plenty of new friends saw us off, back to Stuttgart on scarce sleep (and me on none - when Tony crashed, I sang Pulp's "Bar Italia" to myself as I beelined for the city-center Starbucks). I swore I would never fly to Europe for a single week, but I don't regret making this exception.