Wanting Alaska.

If you've ever met me or ever read anything I've written you'll know three things;
1) I'm almost always wearing an item of clothing that as a hole in it.
2) I really like salmon.
3) My hero is a man that burnt all his money, kissed goodbye to a life of conventional living and opened his eyes to a world that still remains so unknown to so many.

Maybe it was the day that we sat in a hotel room and my beautiful friend told me who Christopher McCandless was and implored me to find out for myself or the day that my best friend gave the book to me to read or maybe long before either of those things even occurred that I wanted to go to Alaska.

I remember when I'd first arrived in KL, a conversation I'll never forget outside of a Starbucks at 2am about how I'd love to one day make my way to Alaska. I thought to myself "someday, someday I'll know what it feels like to be there."

But a wanting of something isn't ever really enough, Roosevelt pointed this out to me. He asked "what are you going to do to get the things you want?"

My answer wasn't a courageous one. It's scary to deal with, all this wanting.

It wasn't until I took a seat next to a man on a train going from Stockholm to Karlstad that it changed. I still remember his calming, vibrant blue eyes, yellow-grey speckled hair and how he smiled with his eyes.

His name was Beau-Jacobs.

I've tried to write about him so many times in the past but nothing seemed to do him justice.
You see Beau changed how I saw the world like only a stranger can. In those four hours, he taught me more about myself then most people I'd known for years. He was an environmental scientist, he'd recently married the love of his life, he enjoyed his hobby as a carpenter and was building a house in the Swedish country-side with he bare hands.
When he spoke, I believed every word that left his mouth and he seemed to fill me with all the danger that comes with believing in yourself.

"So this Alaska dream," he pauses to give me time to collect my thoughts, "why don't you just go there?"

A hundred reasons scroll through my head like a check list of fears but none of them seem fit enough for me to say a loud. Not to Beau. To anyone else, perhaps but not to the man who had just spent hours teaching me philosophy and all he'd discovered about the world during his own travels.

And "I will," is all that comes out of my mouth. The wanting escalates.

When his stop arrives, he looks me in the eyes, smiles and says something completely unprovoked that still baffles me. "Don't worry Tara, she'll find you," and I can't even talk because my armour is so cracked that it's pushing down on my ribs and he leaves me sitting there filled with confusion and hope and I promise myself something.

The next day I share my first kiss abroad, at 3 am sitting on top of a hill in the country-side. "You're so fucking amazing," she whispers in my ear and because of that memory, I've never felt lonely again.

When Isaac and I ventured to the Grand Canyon, it changed how I saw nature. It made me happy to simply be alive and it washed every other thought from me. Cleansed me.

In exactly one week time, I'll be boarding the flight I thought I'd never have the courage to get on. In an almost taunting way, tonight I can see the Northern Lights from my balcony and any hope that I had of sleep has escaped me because I'm kept awake by my wanting.

Riding in Cars with Girls.

I’ve never travelled with girls before...

It’s quite strange that I haven’t. I think at one stage I was in a group that consisted of something like seven boys and myself. My New Yorker was confused when she saw who I'd rolled into town with. Her immediate reaction was to ask; ‘where's the harem of male followers you normally have running around with you?’ So for me to travel with Hayley and Jodie made me a little nervous.

We’d all met working together in Whistler and we all lived in staff housing. With quality bonding activities like this;

everyone gets to know each other pretty quickly.

We'd decided to go to Ontario to see Jodie because she'd left Whistler to go back home some time ago. Fun fact, I'd almost decided to live in Toronto over Vancouver so I was curious how my life would have played out if I'd made a different decision.

One thing that surprised me, was how flat the landscape is. The horizon stretches on for days and there’s barely a hill let alone any mountains. It's for this reason that Canadians in BC call it On-terrible. I think it's still pretty though because of all the fresh water lakes.

As far as the city itself is concerned, Toronto has so many things going for it. 

In 1992, on a hot Summers day, a woman took off her shirt and bra to expose her naked breast in public. After she was fined for indecent exposure, she took the inequality issue to court because men expose their hairy nipples.

It’s now legal for women to be topless in public.

That is probably my favorite Toronto fact and not just because of the obvious reasons. It sums up the city pretty well. Anything goes in Toronto. We also happened to be there during Gay Pride Week and I wondered what on Earth it would be like (marriage equality’s the hot protest topic in Australia and the argument against practically bores me now).

Would it just be one glorious week of Canadians screaming ‘we’re gay!’, colourful parades and pretty beads?! 

Nope, pride week in Canada had Canadians being proud to be gay, but it also acknowledged transgender and transsexual's within the community. Welcoming them. Embracing who they were.

I don’t think there’s anyone in the world that wouldn’t feel at home in Toronto. 

Well maybe if you’re bi-sexual… greedy bastards.

I was also just really excited to be travelling again. We’d planned out a routine for our road trip and assumed our roles. Jodie drove, 

I directed,

Hayley supplied her amazing company.

Being so used to travelling with guys, I’d forgotten how much girls talk when you're stuck in a confide space with them. Girls can talk so much more about a lot less.

For starters I didn’t know it was possible to divide the topic of ‘hair’ into a plethora of sub-topics. Like the best way to remove an ingrown hair, why store bought hair dye is so bad for your hair, how this shampoo doesn’t clean your hair as well as this other shampoo and the pros and cons to the thickness/thinness of ones hair.

Travelling as a group of three girls is weird because it seems to attract packs of (generally) strange and unattractive men. Hayley happily giggling and joking with 5 male security guards in the most homosexual part of Toronto, while Jodie drowns in a sea of all too keen lesbians, wasn’t exactly an irregular occurrence.

They also seem to get me into a lot more trouble.

It’s definitely something special when I can comfortably let myself fall asleep as Jodie’s little spoon and then having to say sorry for drooling on her pillow and she apologizes for drooling all over my back.

I love that we’re three people from very different backgrounds and from opposite parts of the world but we couldn’t relate to each other any better because we share the same passion;

Travelling.