The Joy of Travel

 

I’ve loved to travel since as far back as I can remember. I was enamored with airports at age three and there were many, many nights my dad drive us out to the Indianapolis airport to watch the planes takeoff and land. It was fun to imagine all the places the people were going to and coming back from. It didn’t have to be travel via the air as I also loved long car trips. What was the allure of this? Why did I crave the open road or dream about new places? Even at a young age I realized travel was a great equalizer and it as also freeing from routine.

Being on the autism spectrum, I crave routine and schedules even though it can be taxing at times. There was a great sense of anxiety at school when the schedule was teetering on being off. If a class were to take place at 10:10 it best not be 10:12 and we still be on the previous subject. This was a painful experience, but with travel the routine that was is no more.

One of the most vital statements, I believe, the world needs to know about the autism spectrum is that we operate under a system of, “whatever happens first always has to happen.” There’s safety in schedules and the predictable. However, can there actually be a world where this happens 100%? Wouldn’t it be nice if there was? There isn’t, though, and I realize this and will try and do whatever I can to preserve what was with the previous schedule and the events I’m expecting to occur.

When traveling, unless visiting the exact same spot, there’s no “first” to go by. Everything is new and I’m not chained by experiences of the past. I’ve been blessed to have traveled so much in my life and I attribute a considerable amount of my growth to that.

Routines are awesome, but if you go back to the person I was when writing Finding Kansas, I would have much preferred staying in a state of stagnation because it was predictable and with that came a great sense of safety.

One of the difficult things I have, when explaining this, is to describe what is easy and what is extremely difficult for me. In December 2018, I used some miles to go to Tokyo and I needed a ride to the airport to call my dad and I asked him if he could give me a ride. He mentioned that he knew I had no races and no presentations, so he was a bit perplexed. Oh, I forgot to tell you I booked this for a flight that left just 10 hours later.

That spontaneous trip was a thrill, and maybe for yourself you got a bit of anxiety thinking of the prospect of traveling internationally without a plan. It may be anxiety inducing for you, it was a freeing experience for myself. Reading this, you may think that all things regarding travel are easy. They are not. This is where the difficulties in understanding the peaks and valleys come in because I may have had no fear doing the trip but using the phone to talk to the airline? That’s impossible for me. The little things can be impossible which can lead to confusion because others may think that, since the grand is easy, the little things must be too. This isn’t the case.

All that is why I crave the open road, or the long flight. To be free of the routine I have daily is freeing. Environment is tied to routine so I can’t simply do this in my own home. I’ve tried, but location is part of the routine and even at a young age I knew this. I remember one of the family trips to Florida growing up, telling my dad that, for me, it was the trip to Florida I looked forward to the most because everyone on the road shared the same thing; being in a car traveling somewhere not knowing any other person’s story, and them in turn not knowing ours. While I didn’t understand my classmates in school in terms of story or emotions, I did understand that, while traveling, we all shared in the journey of the open road.