When I was turning 25, I noticed a bit of a pattern to my birthdays: I had celebrated each one so far in a different country.
It wasn’t really planned, it just worked out that way. I was living in other countries and traveling around, so I really didn’t have to go out of my way to somewhere; I already was somewhere.
But this year just felt different. Friday night (the 13th) approached, and I still didn’t have a ticket anywhere. I was absolutely shattered from a really long week and going off next to no sleep, and I just felt like I really, really couldn’t be bothered. I started looking online for tickets, and everywhere was just so expensive. The most affordable places were Tobago (Trinidad & Tobago), Guatemala, and Canada.
And on top of that, I was — for whatever reason — scared. I sat there for a few minutes heavily contemplating a four-day trip to Guatemala, but I felt nervous about it. I called a friend and spoke to her - did it seem worth it? Was I pushing it? Four days?
I messaged my friend Lydia over in London. “I am like terrified at the thought of getting on a plane right now. This is weird.”
My phone buzzed on the bed beside me. “Now that is not the Allie I know!” she wrote back.
I started thinking of things like planes disappearing, getting kidnapped, and not being at all prepared to get on a plane the next morning to head to an entirely new area of the world that I had zero knowledge of. I just felt like it was far too rushed. When I finally do make my way to South America/Central America, I want to do it properly at my own pace, not one where I am racing against the clock.
There was something else driving the nerves, too: Comfort. I haven’t ever been this comfortable before, and I am comfortable in New York (save for the professional aspect of my life). I don’t have the same nagging urge to uproot my life and travel like I did when I was living in uni or in Korea or Australia (though the more money I save, the more my brain starts working out the finances for travel). I think that comfort is both a good and bad thing. I don’t want comfort to lead to complacency, because there is so much I still want to do and see. I don’t want to be comfortable right now. Give me a few more years of spontaneous adventures (aka research for my book), and then I’ll settle back down in New York happily ever after.
I sat there on my bed looking for cheapest plane tickets out of New York, I told myself: Just go. You are going to regret not going. You’ll be fine once you book the ticket. The thrill will come back. Just book a ticket somewhere.
And then I found it: $190 return to Toronto leaving first thing the next morning and coming back on Tuesday. I booked it. And I started getting excited. I didn’t know a damn thing about Toronto except that Vogue had named one of its neighborhoods as the trendiest in the world (the second most to be exact).
So here I am, writing this blog post from my hostel in Toronto (my apologies for no pictures; I can’t upload them to the computer) after a day of walking around and exploring the city. It’s been amazing.
And the best part? I go home after this. I go back to my friend and family on Tuesday to celebrate my birthday with them for the first time in five years.
Here’s to my last night of being 27.
