Get Out the Map

Before I left, Sally, one of my favorite lawyers that I worked with at my old firm, told me a story about how one time her and her husband just got into the car and drove without a plan.  There is something romantic about meandering about aimlessly.  I’ve always daydreamed about going to an airport and picking the next flight out of town, no matter what its destination.

As much as we have more flexibility on this trip than most Americans have when they travel, we still typically have some semblance of a plan, even if we end up changing it later.  As romantic as travelling without a plan sounds, I can’t bring myself to do it completely.  To truly travel freely, you need to not care where you go.  You need to not care how long you stay somewhere or what you see.  You also need to not care how much money you spend.  We probably planned less than most; I always dreamed of going somewhere, but never the specifics once we got to somewhere.  We used all of our pre-trip planning time just to have a rough idea of the countries we wanted to visit.  People kept asking me before we left, so, where are you going to visit in Japan?  In South Africa?  In Spain? I never had an answer.  This means we do most of our planning on the fly.  Although we usually procrastinate in making our plans, eventually we always come up with something.  It is too hard otherwise, especially if you want to find efficient, low-cost flights, or go somewhere in certain seasons, or sometimes to even get into a country.  I still have not shed my anxious, perfectionist self enough to truly throw all plans out the window.

But sometimes it is fun to truly not care where you will be for the next few days, to pick your next destination by where your finger lands on the map.  The first time we didn’t really have a concrete plan was when everyone left us in Kilkenny to fly home.  Our friends kept asking us where we were going after they left.  It is a foreign concept to not have a planned itinerary for travel to Americans who are used to making the most out of limited time.  Compared to our friends, and compared to our pre-trip selves, after four months of travel, we were now becoming somewhat used to not knowing where we were sleeping that night (even if there are some days I am not entirely comfortable with that concept).  Sitting in the car in Kilkenny, we kept asking each other, so, where should we go? We had just shy of two weeks before we had to return the rental car in Dublin to travel wherever we wanted in Ireland, with our only goal of wanting to eventually head up to Northern Ireland.  We hadn’t even booked our tickets to South Africa yet (or really decided exactly where we wanted to go in Africa).

We decided to head north straight away through a mountain pass marked as scenic on our map, and then make a detour over to the part of the penninsula past Galway we hadn’t seen.  The sad truth is, going someplace random means that, more often than not, you end up in towns like Birr.  Situated square in the middle of Ireland, Birr, and the surrounding areas, lack the dramatic scenery of the coasts.  Best I can tell, Birr’s claim to fame is that the first automobile fatality occurred there when an early model car collided with a horse and buggy.  Our options for dining on a Saturday night were Indian or miscellaneous Asian food.  Birr would have been a good town to check out local pub life, because surely there were no other tourists there, had we not been detoxing after the ten days with our friends from home.  Birr is a perfectly fine town, but sometimes there is a reason why certain areas are touristy and others are not.

Greetings from South Africa!

Finding Internet in South Africa is a major pain in the butt.  In the States, we are used to all the Internet our hearts desire.  Like an all-you-eat buffet or refillable super-size drinks, Internet plans are all-you-can-surf, and free wi-fi hotspots are plentiful.  In South Africa, places typically pay for Internet by the amount of data they use, meaning a lot of places are reluctant to offer wi-fi, let alone for free.  Based on the experiences of people who traveled here a couple of years ago, like Theresa and Jeff from Lives of Wander, it seems like Internet is more prevalent, but it is not like it is in the United States or Europe.  It is not a given that a place will have it, and if we find it, that we won’t be paying a fortune for the brief limited use of a crappy computer.  Even if a place has wi-fi, on many frustrating occasions my computer will connect to the network but will not allow me to access any websites.  I’m not sure why South Africa hates my netbook (or why my netbook hates South Africa), but this Internet problem is the bane of my existence at the moment.  Although sometimes delays on the blog are the result of me not having time to write, for once, I actually have posts and pictures lined up, just no way to post them.  After staying a slew of budget accommodations for the past week or so, we splurged on a nice guesthouse in Johannesburg with….drumroll, please…free wi-fi that actually works on my computer.  Hopefully I didn’t jinx anything by saying that, so I can plug away on getting the rest of the Ireland posts out for your reading pleasure.  And of course I have lots to share about our wonderful experiences in South Africa.  So, as usual, thanks for sticking with me and please stay tuned.  Happy Friday, everyone!