Travelling isn’t a vacation, it isn’t just easily leaving everything behind at home to go lie on a beach with your biggest worry getting sun burnt, or what type of drink to order from the poolside bar. Travelling, to me, has always been about exploration and gaining all the experience in the world that working a day job, or sitting in a classroom will never teach or gain you.
And while posh hotels, fancy cuisine, and walking cities are all great things… Being invited into locals homes in the countryside for visits is much more rich an experience than any of that will ever be to me. Seeing the smile on their faces while filling three buckets full of berries from their fields is something I’ll never forget, along with having a meal that was made literally from just what grows in their garden, or exploring the museum upstairs that has been there for the past sixty years. These are the payoffs that make leaving the comforts of home to sleep on a best friends floor for a month entirely worthwhile. And as long as those trade-offs still feel more like a payoff than a sacrifice, I’ll know that life on the road remains my calling.
On my last evening in Helsinki, Anna & I decided to really make it memorable and celebrate an enormously successful trip overseas by finding the most posh restaurant in the city centre and spending an evening dining on the patio overlooking the white Lutheran Cathedral, which I’m sure you remember from my previous posts.
The past month and a little bit was a remarkable time spent exploring, discovering, and rendezvousing with all the right places, circumstances & people imaginable, so… thank you. Thank you, Anna. And thank you to each person I had a magnificent rendezvous with!
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