Do People Decide Not to Travel? (Or Do They Just Want a Painted House?)

I am so absolutely lucky and grateful to be married to Marina. Marina and I absolutely share the love for traveling. And I know, you can say “annoyingly cliché, everyone loves traveling”. But one could argue this point. I for one can say that there are four points to this in my head. First, not everyone loves traveling. To me this seemed unlikely at first, but I met several folks who don’t like getting far from their home by choice. Many of them are Irish, curiously. They simply don’t feel like going through life in a relatively small radius from their house is a negative thing. Even more, they feel like the idea of going to places they don’t know, with a language they can’t speak or read in is outright undesirable.

Second point, a lot of people love going on vacation and they happen to travel a bit. But just enough to be far away from their place of work or their home so it doesn’t feel like wasting free time at their usual surroundings. In this category of people, I include those that pendularly always go to the same place every year on their time off. Which while technically is still a travel, it means that they like to go to that specific place, like the closest beach. Which is not the same as enjoying traveling in the touristic sense. In my head, these people don’t necessarily like traveling.

The third point is that there are people who like traveling, yes, but they don’t ‘love’ traveling. They do that very eventual trip, do their tours and enjoy themselves quite a bit. But when it comes to everyday life decisions that silently ask them “would you rather travel or do anything else?”, they choose something else frequently. So seeing other things and moving to different places gets lowered in the priorities. In this set of people, I’d see people who have on their budget and schedule the possibility of travel, but they consistently choose other directions that would conflict with this goal, like changing cars every 2 years instead of every 5, redecorating constantly, spending every possible opening with family and friends that live close by, supporting a football club, among many other fun hobbies.

And then the last group is, yes, the people who actually love to travel. Like Marina and myself. This distinction I have in my head comes as opposition to the first three points. We don’t like staying home in our time off like the first group. We don’t like to go to the same place at every opportunity just to stay away from home, travel is a chance you can’t miss to see new things even if it is in the same geographic region. And we do prioritize our trips over several different competing projects. This last part is one that I feel is the one we consider the most. We avoid several expenses that would conflict with our possibility of visiting new places.

To give you an idea, we live in Ireland and I think we hardly ever been to a pub. Even though several of our friends had the pubs as a default meeting place. In our minds the usual 60 euros spent on a weekend at a pub can be turned to 30 or less if we do the same gathering at home. In 10 events, you’d save 300 which is the flight to go to several destinations VERY far from home. We have a car that is way cheaper and smaller than several friends we have that claim they can’t travel exclusively because of money. We don’t change our phones as often as we could if we were to take one less trip every year, our home is in desperate need of painting and that got delayed for an entire year already. We missed baptisms, weddings, birthday parties and even funerals that risked some of our plans. Those were the hardest decisions, of course. Even the life decision that caused us both to meet, Marina and I, working on the cruise ship when we had absolutely no money at all, was to allow us to see new places. That’s a big pivotal life decision.

The travel options themselves are thought to allow for as many trips as possible. We research the best possible period to spend less on flights and other bookings, we go to cheap hotels and use public transportation a lot and we don’t mind making sacrifices to make things happen. We have slept in trains, airport lobbies and hotels that didn’t actually had a room to host us, only a space in the floor behind a curtain. We worked in exchange for our accommodation, sold gadgets and furniture we were not using and allocated the funds to that and stayed with friends. Even the home we live in was chosen partially based on its closeness and public connection to Dublin airport.

And don’t get me wrong, by no means I think that the path we took is the correct one. Not at all. In my mind these are simply different opinions about what is relevant in life. Like one person enjoying running as an exercise and another preferring buying a bike and cycling around. Whatever floats your boat. Additionally, I am absolutely not talking about people that can’t do it because there’s simply not enough money to do this. Where is not a matter of option and selecting priorities, there’s simply not enough resources. We’ve been there and I do have a good understanding of that scenario. Before I turned 24, I mostly hadn’t traveled to a different state than the one I was born in. This text however, is not talking about this specific issue.

We do get, at times, that we travel a lot. Like if this was easy or if we got our trips as a sort of gift. I don’t mind people thinking that, but I have already heard these things from people that have way more resources and time than we do. Just different priorities and levels of comfort that they are not willing to negotiate. To me that’s a choice in itself. There may come a time when I get older, that taking a flight with long connection times or sleeping in capsules and taking trains will become too taxing for me and I’ll just stay home. I do hope however that, when that happens, I’ll be satisfied that my warm, safe and cosy bed at home is the main priority to me. And I’ll be able to watch a rerun on Netflix with a sense of living my best life. Probably alone, since Marina will be traveling with her new boyfriend. Maybe I won’t feel as lucky anymore. I’ll have to wait and see, or perhaps meet my next wife. A couch loving person, probably.