How I Ended up on a Cruise Ship

There are a lot of things in life that I don’t understand.

For example people who respond with “the ceiling” when asked, “what’s up?”, those who can’t see the benefits obvious of the metric system and…

Cruise ships.

So while I’m sitting by the pool, with my towel over my head trying not to burn (because I’m Australia and I’m sun smart), I’m going to explain how I got here.

Never, ever, in my wildest dreams did I think I would be here, at the age of 21, drifting between islands in the Bahamas with Dan.

Sure, perhaps I visualized us doing this in our mid sixties and after the bitterness of not having shared my life with Natalie Portman makes me a grumpy old woman.

After travelling for months on end, my bank account and my physical body have become exhausted.

The rate I can write all these experiences down before my memory twists and changes them has diminished. I would previously stay awake an extra couple of hours because I find it soothing.

Basically, I was tired ALL of the time.

I was too tired to write, too tired to shake the writers block I’d developed and wasn’t sleeping.

Dan heard from a friend’s sister that there were all-inclusive cruises that cost roughly $34 a day. This included accommodation, entertainment and food. It was an opportunity to save a bit of cash.

I wasn’t instantly sold (travelling has NOT helped my commitment issues).

For the next 24 hours, Dan told me only of how amazing the weather was. Clear skies, between 25 and 28 degrees all day long.

“You can write in you diary,” he tells me.
I’m quick to correct him; “it’s a journal… or, a collection of personal essays if you prefer.”

I think it might be nice because I’ll actually have time to read some of these books I’ve been carrying around.

Also I miss the ocean.

If there’s anything I really, really miss it’s my dog and the sound of waves crashing on the shore from my bed late at night. I eventually agreed because I recognized that a rest is really what I need.

We felt out of place because we don’t have matching outfits and were first on everyone else’s packing list.

We also made up 66.66% of our demographic.

To do nothing for the next three days proved to be difficult for me… well, at first anyway.

Before I knew it I was sleeping in for too long, participating in music trivia and laughing with Ethel from 3032 about her husbands uncontrollable snoring.

Cabin fever had obviously set in.

Also, it turns out cruise ships are a great place to resume my favorite hobby; people watching/listening to other peoples conversations.

I’m enthralled in ALL of Debora’s relationship problems with Steve and why he won’t commit to her and Shaun’s obvious cocaine addiction, which he just refuses to get treatment for.
Not to mention rumors of divorce and children and infidelity floating around the place.

My tolerance for Titanic jokes has vanished all together.

We did get to stop at Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas which was nice but sadly the weather just didn't hold up for us. 

The best thing though, is that it has given me a time to enjoy Dan’s company before we leave each other and move onto the next chapter of our lives where I can continue attempting to shape the person that I want to become.

Nola

In my favourite part of my favourite book, Kerouac describes the jazz music scene in New Orleans.

Before I left, I had this picturesque idea of what it would be like.

I fantasised that there would be music overflowing from all the bars and onto the streets. I could almost hear brass and wind instruments in my sub-concious. Contagious music made by amazingly free spirited people littering the town.

I decided that I was going to buy a second hand saxophone (because my birthday wouldn’t be far away) so I could teach myself how to play through the winter.

I imagined myself carelessly passing through the city with my backpack. My rosy cheeks slightly red from the sun and my eyes are the heaviest they’ve been, but I’m the happy.

I’d written this idea down on a piece of paper and tucked it into my travel wallet.

Some days on the road I would take it out and read about everything I expected from New Orleans because everyday that passed, I grew closer to becoming that person.

Now, I’m actually here.

There is music everywhere!
People do dance on the streets and drink whisky and horribly alcoholic concoctions and everything is drums, brass and bass.

People know every word to anything by Curtis Mayfield and ‘Groove Tonight’ by Earth, Wind and Fire blasts live from Jazz Clubs and I’m standing on a bar top dancing with a man that plays the saxophone as though he’s just breathing.

But something’s not right.

When I was in Atlanta (I’ll share my experiences there soon), I stayed with a lovely couple I’d met while in Florence. They spoke about New Orleans a lot. Tosh was from Louisiana and Suzi had met him when they both attended Louisiana State University. I joked that they should just move there because both of their eyes lit up when they spoke about the city.

Suzi replied that she loved it and it was one of her favourite cities to visit but she’d never consider living there and that I “would understand soon enough.”

I think I expected New Orleans to still reflect the 1920’s home of Jazz that I read about in my year 11 History books or the 50's beat generation. 
While at first glance, it does and I did have an amazing time…

I didn’t expect the massive, very obvious divide in classes. 
Actually, I didn’t really expect it from America at all… at least not to the degree I've found it.

It makes me sad to see how people are treated because, as hard as I sometimes try not to, I love people. I love all people.

“Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.”
I really wish people understood this better because compassion is something that everyone deserves, independent of race.

I now understood why they wouldn’t live there. I’m sure that just bellow the surface bubbled a very dark New Orleans.

Where the performers play their instruments, not out of love but out of lust and they crave money because it feeds their addictions.

I was particularly grateful to have met a girl from Victoria at the hostel. She was a music student and talked about a man called Jon Cleary. On the second night we were there, we ventured far from Bourbon and Frenchmen street and went to a small run down Jazz bar, miles from the city centre.

It was a part of town that wasn’t known for its creature comforts or safety, (something we learnt after fire ants attacked us).

Jon wore old faded jeans, a navy blue floppy hat that hid his large red ears and an oversized grey jumper. It looked like his mother had forced him to buy clothes three sizes to big so he could grown into them… which was particularity bazar considering he was well into his fifties.

When Jon sat down at that piano and when his voice rang of pain and heart ache while he begged his love not to leave him. His feet stomping the ground to create an addictive pulsating beat.

I could feel every inch of sorrow and pain that my heart has ever experienced.
I could feel all the sadness and grief that I’ve ever witnessed. 

When he flung his head back and held that note perfectly, my eyes watered and I smiled.

As my soul melted, I thought that perhaps what I had dreamed of New Orleans was still real.

Maybe not everything here died when the dollar learnt not just to speak, but to scream, turning the American dream shallow behind white picket fences.

I'm not sure what I expected to find in New Orleans but I don't think I've found it just yet and I might not by simply hopping from city to city.

Roderick Nash wrote; 

“wilderness appealed to those bored or disgusted with man and his works… it’s an ideal stage for the Romantic individual to exercise the cult that he frequently made of his own soul.”

I own a Winter coat!

THIS winter coat which makes me not shiver anymore.

Right at this very second, I'm sitting uncomfortably on some cold metal chairs, that I'm sure used to be red, at a Grey Hound terminal in Richmond, Virginia.

It's 5:25am.

I'm doing surprisingly well with this fact.

I'm in the middle of a 16 hour commute from New York to Charlotte, North Carolina.

Nearly two weeks ago, I left Isaac in Vegas to make my way to Philadelphia. While I do love that R. Kelly's remix to Ignition is still in California's Top 40, I wanted to go back to the East Coast because I missed so much. I'm almost certain Isaac wasn't ready to go home.
I was very happy our rolls weren't reversed.

Everyday I'm away, I hear about some illustrious distant land somewhere that promises me something glorious and I want nothing more than to make my way there and take it.

At the moment I'm pretty set on making my way to Alaska with someone amazing after the ski season. I have to be careful because wanting everything is very similar to wanting nothing.

I hope Isaac makes it back over here at some point because someone needs to ensure I get into a healthy amount of trouble.

Philadelphia is a great town and I stayed at a really friendly hostel where I met some fantastic people. Everyone that actually lives there has some kind of strange emotional hang up that they're only too keen to tell you about, given the right amount of liquor. I won't go into detail but the story ends with us fleeing from a girl that owned just far too many cats.

Philly is also the most liberated place in the world!! I say this because while I was there, I visited the constitution center...
located in Independence Mall,
on Independence Ave,
oposite Independence Park,
where the Liberty Bell lives.

I wish I was making this up.

I was in Philadelphia to meet up with Dan, my other more stylish and responsible half and to lick the Liberty Bell.

As it turns out, American takes the protection of its national artefacts rather seriously.

Even if I did make it past the aligator infested moat, used my limited contortion skills to navigate my way through the maze of lazer death beams and answered the Liberty Bell's guard trolls three riddles correctly, I'm sure I would have been shot by security before I could taste delicious liberty.

Also Dan just out right refused to take the photo in fear of becoming my neighbour in an immigration jail. 

I was pleased that we managed to make it to a Philly Roller Girls roller derby match because girls on skates beating each other up... yes please.

After Philly, we took a short bus ride to Washington DC to chase a band and play Drag Bingo. 

Oh and the Smithsonian and monuments and blah blah.

I look mildly insane because all I did in DC was take photos of trees and jump around in leaves and kick them about. Someone said to me, "it's like you've never seen fall before!" I assured them that that's exactly what it's like because I have never experienced fall before. 

While I was lucky to miss out on the effects of Hurricane Sandy, Daniel wasn't and it had cut into the time he had put aside for New York.
I very happily suggested that we should go back there. Not so I can see the friends I miss too much already, eat bagels at my favourite cafe' in Bushwick or go ice-skating and see 5th Ave's Christmas decorations but... you know... for him.

I won't talk about New York... again... but I'm going to move there so I can marry the bartender of my dreams but for now, I had to start make my way South.

I do like that you experience places differently depending on who your with. I like that the other persons perspective rubs off on me. It forces me to look at things differently and sometimes it teaches me patience and I'm certain it's teaching Dan tolerance... if he had room to learn any more.

We've come up with this very delicate, very scientific way of deciding where we go next. We throw the names of all the cities we think we'd like to go to into my bandana and pull somewhere out. In doing this, we agree on one rule.

Whatever the bandana says. Goes. 

So, there, that's how we ended up heading South on a bus to North Carolina and how I've ended up listening to Jinja Safari, while I watch the sun rise over the Virginia country side with my best friend of ten years.

3 Months On

I recently did an interview for someone awesome. It was for a uni assignment about the concept of home. 

She’s an Arts major… be kind.

Anyway it reminded me of this time when I was a kid.

I had just turned six and we’d not so long ago moved from Bali back to Perth. I think it was particularly hard for me at the time but I don’t remember why. I just remember I wasn’t really adjusting.

I would just keep threatening to run away from home in "classic Blinky Bill" style.

I know now that it probably really hurt my mum but she managed to put an end to it pretty quickly. I think it must have been the third or fourth day that a head strong, six year old me, swore I was leaving.

So she very casually lent down, looked me in the eyes and said, “I’m sorry you don’t feel happy here. I love you, I’ll always love you and you’ll always have a home here but you should find somewhere that makes you happy and a family that can do that for you.”

Then she walked me to the front door, shoved me outside and closed it behind me.

I didn’t even make it past the letterbox before I burst into tears and was begging to come home.

I remember she opened the door and just laughed, smiled and welcomed me back.

I never threatened to run away again. Well at least before this trip anyway.

I’ve been gone for almost three months now.
Yeah, I know. It feels like FOREVER ago that I left that tiny Perth airport. 

Although I’ve tried, how can I even begin to explain to you all the things that have happened to me in that time.

All the people I’ve met, everything I’ve experienced and all the things that still lie ahead of me. I can’t accurately summarize it.

How can I possibly explain how it feels to see the Grand Canyon with your own eyes? Or to stand on the top of the Empire State Building or to ride past a pirate ship in San Diego or run through crowds in Mexico City or to see Vegas rise up out of the desert?

Some days I look at my backpack and wish I'd left all of it behind because all it does is slow me down when I’m trying to run for the bus or train or plane. When I was packing, I couldn't bare the thought of leaving any of it behind. 

It was the feeling I got, when I found a clearing in the shrubbery that surrounds the canyon and stood on the edge of that cliff. When my legs trembled ever so slightly and my lungs stung, it making it hard to breath at that altitude.

When you see that Canyon stretch out in front of you for miles and miles and feel that warm desert breeze on your face.

It's THAT feeling that makes you never want to care about Facebook or your smart phone or the balance of your bank account because none of it is a measure of who you are.

You've been gifted this opportunity to feel your heart pounding in your chest and adrenaline coursing through your veins.

I understand all too well what Christopher McCandless meant when he wrote “you are wrong if you think happiness radiates only from interpersonal relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience.
We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.”

That's why I travel. That's the reason why I left, because I let myself become too concerned with others and all the bullshit you fill your life with. 

Because there's nothing like looking in a rear view mirror and watching the city slowly disappear.

Even though I’m excited for the day that I eventually do come home and to show off the new person I’ve become, I’ve still got so far to go. 

For now I've got nothing to do but to turn up The Shins on my iPod and board that next anything to take me somewhere.