Cry Me a River

I’m sitting in an airplane somewhere over Canada as I type this. It’s a big airplane and it’s taking me to Paris for a quick layover. Then a smaller plane will take me to Venice, where a private car will be waiting to drive me two-and-a-half hours up into the Dolomites, where I’ll be staying in a beautiful hotel, treated to curated meals by some of the area’s best chefs, fit for a loaner bike that costs only a few thousands dollars less than my Volkswagen, and riding a bike race that is at or very damn near the top of most serious cyclists’ bucket lists. All of it is being paid for and, on top of that, I’ll get paid when I get home, write about the experience, and file the story to the magazine who bought this silly idea. Because, as a travel writer, that’s my job.

Sounds amazing right? And it is. That I not only get to do this shit but that I also get paid for it is absolutely unbelievable, insane, bonkers, ridiculous, absurd, and all the other adjectives that I can’t think of right now because I’m sitting on this plane, listening to and trying to discern a French announcement. It’s a reality that finds me often having to pinch myself, that I have somehow landed in this trade, that all of the steps I’ve taken in my life (chief amongst them, marrying a woman who supported my silly dreams, even when I was pulling in a cool $5,000 in my first year as a “full-time” writer) led me to this moment, on this plane, headed to this bike race. Travel writing has brought me north of the Arctic Circle to go dogsledding beneath the Northern Lights, to magical Christmas villages in the Balkans, and mountain biking one of the premier trail systems in the United States, deep in the wild of the Badlands. I’ve stayed in a $1500 a night suite in the middle of the desert and gone off-piste snowboarding with a guy who owns a whole-ass mountain. etc. etc. blah blah blah.

A: You get the point

And

B: This #humblebrag has gone on long enough.

And for all of the wonderful experiences I get to have as a professional adventure-taker (and to be clear, travel writing is only part of how I pay the bills. I write about a lot of other stuff. I even teach sometimes, too!), there’s a big, huge, massive, glaring part of this job that absolutely sucks.

Because for as much as I love getting paid to go have once-in-a-lifetime adventures three or four or five times a year, I love my kids and my wife even more. And, for as much as I hate hate hate leaving them, even if it’s just for three or four or five days, I hate the fact that I’m unable to share these unbelievable experiences with them. I can tell my son what it felt like to dive into a river rushing through the center of Vilnius in the middle of December, but I can’t hold his hand as he jumps in with me. I can describe some of the best meals of my life to Emily but I can’t enjoy them with her. I guess the only good part is that my little girl has no way of knowing that I didn’t actually meet Olaf from Frozen that week I spent up near the North Pole. I’m gonna sit on that lie for as long as she’ll believe it.

Sometimes, the people, organizations, towns, cities, and nations who host me for these trips tell me I can bring my family. And someday, I’m sure I will (that is, if there’s still a freelance journalism ecosystem to speak of in the next decade). But right now, given that most of the thrust of my “speciality,” whatever that means, is having very fun but very physically demanding adventures, my kids are still far too young to come along for the ride.

Travel writing is not all sunshine and rainbows. Yes, it’s private tours and Michelin-starred meals and seeing sides of a place that most people only get to read about (which, you know, because we write about it). But it’s also spending four, five, six, eight, ten days alone, away from my family. It’s nights spent in bed reading a novel or pre-writing my drafts or watching whatever movie I know Emily was planning to watch that night with our kids by myself while she, thousands of miles away, gets to snuggle on the couch with our babies.

Don’t get me wrong, this work is fucking ridiculous and I’m so unbelievably fortunate to be able to do it. That doesn’t mean there isn’t an element of it that sucks.

And I get it: to complain about being a travel writer is to be like one of those professional athletes who complain about only making $20 million a year (we get paid a whole lot less anyway). But dammit, this is my newsletter and so you have to play me your tiny violin and feel bad that I’m sitting on a plane to Venice, en route to a week in one of the most beautiful mountain ranges on Earth.

In a way, I wish I found myself to this work earlier in life, back when I was in my twenties or early thirties, before I met Emily, or even after, but before we had kids. Maybe in that alternate history, I could have been the kind of guy who was jetting around the world to a different place every week. Because for every trip I take in the name of adventure-hunting-in-the-name-of-work, I turn down another dozen. And it’s not because I don’t want to experience those dozen other things. I do. Because they’re fucking amazing things. But they’re not nearly as amazing as these precious few years I have with my kids.

Who knows how different my life would be if I started writing straight out of college rather than taking a little decade-and-a-half detour into the music world?

But, as a firm believer that we are who were are and that we are where we are because each and every choice we made in life led us to the precise place and time that we are, I’m sure my life would look quite different had I played my hand any other way.

One thing I do know is that I have no interest in finding out just how different it might be (not that I ever could). But even if I could go back in time to that fork in the road that became the rest of my life, I would do everything exactly the same. Because that’s the road that led me to them, those people I love more than anything else in the world; more than any trip, any meal, any adventure.