I Love To Travel, Don’t You?

I’m currently sitting next to the toilet on the floor of a German train and have been for the last 2 hours. It’s the June dark (a period on a resident show in which performances are ceased for maintenance of the theatre) and I am on a two-week trip to Germany with my friend Katie. I started in Munich with a stop in Frankfurt, before finishing up in Berlin. Today is our first travel day which was meant to be a 3-hour first class train trip from Munich to Frankfurt, but as you can see above, it’s currently not going as planned. We are now almost four hours in, and have spent the last hour going backwards to change routes to hopefully make it to Stuttgart and eventually Frankfurt Airport (not exactly our intended destination but close enough).

Katie lives in Sydney and I live in Las Vegas, so we try to meet once a year in a new part of the world. Unfortunately, we both have terrible luck when it comes to travel. Recently, I got stuck in New York when bad weather shut down Delta’s hub in Atlanta. It was Thursday night and I had spent hours in the airport and then I was told that I wasn’t going to be able to fly back to Las Vegas until Sunday. I missed two days of work but on the plus side I got to spend an extra few days in my favorite city, and it did make for a ridiculous Facebook status which I titled the ‘JFK Lament’.

Katie once spent 53 hours trying to get back to Sydney from one of our trips to New York. A flight that was meant to go from JFK to Hong Kong, Hong Kong to Sydney, ended up with an extra stop in South Korea to de-ice the plane before eventually getting to Sydney. Katie also once spent a night in Milan train station when her train from Rome to Paris stopped in Milan and didn’t leave again until 6 am the next morning. As I said, we don’t have the best travel luck so the fact that I am typing this on a train floor is really not that surprising and was kind of bound to happen at some point on this trip.

Now, I have totally set you up for an article full of terrible stories about how travel is the worst and you are wondering, was that title just purely sarcastic? Well, you couldn’t be more wrong! While I have my fair share of crazy travel stories, I would not change a thing. To be real, I would happily give anything for an actual seat right now, but that’s beside the point. What I am trying to say is that I absolutely love to travel.

As Stephen Sondheim said “I love a change of pace, I love a change of space. I love to see a place. That’s absolutely new.”

When I crossed immigration in Germany, I was able to tick my 20^th country off the list. I was really hoping to have hit 30 countries by the time I turned 30, but as this is only a month away now, I have changed it to trying for 40 by 40. There are so many parts of the world I still want to see. I want to see the temples in Cambodia and the pyramids in Egypt. I want to see the Northern Lights. I want to sit on a beach in Mexico, and go on safari in Tanzania. I want to spend my life visiting exciting new places and with our industry, it is totally doable. Some people travel with work, on a tour or a job in another country, some people travel when their resident show is dark and some people save their money and travel between gigs. I am truly thankful to work in an industry that not only allows travel, but more often than not requires it.

As I finish this, we have finally made it to Frankfurt. It took three trains and over nine hours, almost three hours of which were spent sitting on the floor. We are sore and tired and hungry, but we made it and we have wine. And tomorrow is a new day. A new day of exploring a new place, and for me, there is no greater joy!