Connecting the Dots

Travel has been a part of my life since I was quite young. My father moved around and traveled quite a bit in his youth, so I think I was born with wanderlust in my bloodstream. I was fortunate as a youngster to have the opportunity to travel. Family trips to see the grandparents, road trips, joining my father on business trips and more.

I had my first solo big trip for my 13th birthday – from my home in Austin to San Francisco, with a side trip to Tahoe. And then when I was 15 I traveled to London on my own for a couple of weeks. And the next year, I spent a good bit of the summer traveling around the now former Soviet Union.

I’ve always loved the entire process of travel – from figuring out where to go, how to get there, what to see, incorporating different modalities, the travel itself and telling stories of it later. And despite having to overcome sometimes overwhelming motion sickness (which I’ve thankfully almost completely pushed out of my life), I loved being in motion.

When I joined my family’s software business when I was 20, one of the roles I was thrust into (aside from technical documentation, user support, training, database management, pool cleaning, cat groomer and programming) was travel arranger. Shortly after I moved to Florida and agreed to help out with the business part time on what was supposed to be a temporary job (which 15 years later I think it’s safe to say it didn’t turn out to be), our company landed a major contract which would require lots of travel to install and train. Not only for our staff, but for staff members of our client who was located in Texas.

I got such a thrill out of tracking down travel options to the nearly 100 locations they needed to go, and coordinating the training and installation schedules. And even though I only traveled to a handful of the locations myself, it was just as exciting for me to handle the travel arrangements for others as for myself. I probably could have had a career as a travel agent as well.

—

Yesterday, Chris and I moved his storage unit from downtown San Francisco up to Sacramento for reasons of cost savings and increased accessibility. We were playing around with the idea of renting a trailer for the Jeep (probably not enough room), or me driving the Jeep up while he drove the rental truck. And then I got the idea of using public transit, and thus we did. It all clicked together.

In the morning, we took CalTrain to pick up the rental truck, loaded up the truck and then drove to Sacramento. Unloaded and dropped off the truck, took a bus to the Amtrak station, took the Capitol Coordidor train to Richmond and transferred to BART into Millbrae to meet back up with Jeep. Aside from all the loading/unloading part, it was a blast.

As I was relaxing on the train from Sacramento after a very long day, my mind reminisced about a lot of the travel I’ve done, and I realized – I love the process of being actively involved in connecting the dots. I love the way things come together and click. And while the dots certainly do matter, it’s the line between them where I find a good bit of of my adventure.

While on the train, my minded started to drift to the thought of “I really should travel more.”

And then, I had the very real realization – I am living my life in motion, in travel and as a line between lots of dots.

And I’m loving it.