Still and all, why bother? Here’s my answer: Many people need desperately to receive this message: “I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don’t care about them. You are not alone.” – Kurt Vonnegut
I am not necessarily an easy person to travel with.
I say “not necessarily” because the difficulty with me lies not in anything that would make me a tiresome travel companion in any normal sense. For instance, I am not high maintenance. I can sleep anywhere, eat anything or not eat anything, depending on the context. I travel light. I can sit quietly and read a book for hours on end or I can chat your ear off, depending on the mood. I don’t get worried if I’m lost, nor do I mind occasionally partaking in a plan of action. I like drinking. I like being sober. I like parks, both empty and full, and nightclubs make me laugh. I like museums and dirt and art and books and coffee and rock music that makes your ears ring in that high pitch buzz sound that indicates some sort of serious damage has been done to your ear drums. I don’t really whine. I don’t mind doing nothing, and I can sit in a car for 12 hours straight and feel entirely comfortable.
I say proudly that in almost all ways, I am an extremely easy person to travel with.
I mean, sometimes I really mess up. Really really mess up. In the normal “I never want to travel with this person again” kind of way. I get thrown off of trains in the middle of nowhere in a strange city because I didn’t buy a ticket. I miss trains entirely and have to rely on the kindness of the conductors giving me time-table advice to successfully navigate my way back home before a specific deadline. I screw up dates and people show up to meet me in places a full month before I’m actually going to be there. I lose my wallet when it has my debit card and driver’s license in it. I get on the wrong bus and find myself in New York City rather than at a beach in Delaware. I get stalked and find myself reading bits and pieces of a book by Milan Kundera while I hide and attempt to control my breathing in some itchy patch of bushes in the middle of Santa Monica.
But in the end, the thing that really gets to people is my inability to not talk to strangers. I talk to everyone. Bar tenders. People at the hostel. Desk clerks. Grocers. Cleaning crews. Policemen. Librarians. Homeless guys on the street. Baristas. Comedians. The people making fun of the comedians. People setting next to me on the bus, in the airplane, on the street bench. I learn about stupid bosses and roommates and jobs I will never have or meet or know, and about parts of the world or the country or the city I will never see, and about diseases I hope I will never contract, and about different kinds of dogs people have owned, drugs I will never abuse (and hope to never try), and so on. I’ve gotten bad directions, good suggestions, and sometimes I learn life stories so beautiful I don’t know whether to write it all down and ask for publishing rights, or sob uncontrollably. And I somehow manage to do it all by the lost art of conversation.
I even do it in the cities I live in. It’s just that my random encounters hold more possibility for later, regular (and perhaps even intentional) random encounters. Sometimes I even plan things.
It’s unfortunate, and I’m not really sure when it actually happened, but talking to strangers with exuberance and curiosity has now become less “friendly” and more “creepy”. Or at the very least, “really fucking obnoxious”. My traveling companions and friends often complain at my incessant need to not only stop and ask for directions, but for suggestions and stories and jokes as well. They also complain about my inability to not take advantage of the slimmest opportunity in which to unload yet another pun, a pun of whose grandiosity is assured in my own mind, on some poor hapless victim. But that’s not actually related to the larger message here.
My friend’s irritation shows itself by them constantly reminding me that I own a smart-phone every time I ask a question or suggest a course of action that involves finding the answer through communication with another human being. Honestly, I do use my smartphone. A lot. I even use it to get directions and bus routes and bar suggestions and phone numbers, and that’s all well and good. I mean, it’s great for making sure that the improv club that someone said was down a dark creepy alleyway was ACTUALLY down the dark creepy alleyway. Not getting raped is a great advantage of having a smart-phone. I quite like not being raped. It’s a super big plus to any day.
I love traveling. A lot. But my fervor for travel and adventure really lies in the stories of others. I love relying on the kindness and spontaneity of strangers. One of my favorite memories of back-packing up and down the California coast was watching the sun set on the ocean up in a dead tree on the side of an embankment with Jay, a strange fellow I had met that morning. He was afraid of heights and thorns and bugs and all things generally “icky” and “ouchy”, but I had shamed him into crawling up into that rotten ol’ hunk of wood with me after I managed to do it successfully, barefoot and in a polka-dotted dress. Those moments don’t happen with smart-phones and Google reviews, ya know? And I may not ever have found that spot on my own. I found it through consistently annoying trolley conductors and bank clerks and random-ass vendors at the farmers market.
I cannot actually go to all of the places I want to go or see all of the things I want to see or do all of the things I want to do. But someone in the world is doing them or has done them or wants to do them, and so I will keep trying my darnedest to engage everyone I can in some sort of meaningful form of face-time.
Posted by Jayme 
