My Last Waltz

When I first created My Road Less Taken I divided it into a section about past travels, a section about the travels I was currently taking in Columbia, and a section about a trip I would take to Eastern Europe in the future. Well, the future has arrived! I probably will not write about any new future travels that could be folded into the present one because as I get older, each new journey becomes more difficult. I’ve found that my inborn wanderlust is beginning to wander off. Despite this unfortunate circumstance I’m planning to make my last extended excursion one of my most difficult. It will be difficult because I plan to explore more countries (10) in a much shorter period of time (6 weeks) than I have ever done in the past. I won’t have much time to relax and rest up in any single country. No, I’m not booking a package tour! I’ve never taken one and I don’t plan to start with my last trip. I prefer to travel by myself and stumble upon the unexpected, rather than listen to some paid guide drone through a shallow, one size fits all presentation that I could easily have gathered from an encyclopedia. I will book my own transport and lodging, which will be a little more difficult this trip because I’m not learning any of the local languages like I did in South America and Japan. There simply isn’t enough time for me to learn 10 separate languages.

Another factor that makes this trip more difficult than previous ones concerns my back, which has been troubling me for the past three years. As a result, I will not be able to travel with a full sized backpack. Instead I will carry 6 weeks worth of clothing, cameras, and a computer in a backpack/roller-bag that will fit in an airplane’s overhead compartment. (See above). I can foresee a point by the middle of my trip where I will be forced to wear dirty clothes. This likelihood doesn’t please me much, but will probably please the people I sit next to on buses and trains even less. My apologies in advance to any Eastern European seat mates.

Finally, converting currency in a thrifty manner will make this trip much more demanding. While some of the countries I will explore use the Euro for their currency, which I always maintain a substantial supply, Poland, the Czech Republic, Ukraine, Norway and Sweden all use their own currency that I will have to convert into and out of again while trying not to get burnt too badly by the conversion fees. The trick will be to figure out how much I will really spend in each country before I change money. If I convert too much into a currency when I arrive in a country, I may end up paying 12% to 20% in buying power after I have converted out of it again when I leave. I hate wasting money on costs that provide nothing in return. It’s going to take a lot of brain power to avoid such waste this time around.

You might ask, “If the trip will be so onerous, why go at all”? Well, I’m visiting this part of eastern Europe because I’ve never done so in the past, and I’m afraid if I wait any longer I’ll never see it. I will soon be too old and tired to make such a trip, especially given my limited travel budget. I also have two friends who have traveled there ahead of me and have spoken glowingly about their experiences. I’d like to be able to see for myself what pleased them so much.

We all carry a few un-examined prejudices around in our back pockets, and it’s time I examined some of my own. Some prejudices are dangerous and hurtful, others not so much, but all indicate an ignorance of the true nature of what really exists. Prejudice can only distort reality. When I imagine Eastern Europe, my mind pictures a countryside that is impoverished and relatively empty of people, and cities that reek with the atmosphere of deceit and corruption exemplified by the movie “The Third Man”. The rational part of my brain knows this view is wrong, because “The Third Man” was set in Vienna, not in Eastern Europe, and it depicted a situation that is now 70 years out of date. I visited Vienna three years ago, and it is now one of my favorite cities. It resembled the movie in no way that I could see, and I expect my prejudices about Eastern Europe to evaporate just as completely once I’m there on the ground.

I will post a number of pictures on Facebook as I conduct my trip, but probably will not post many, or possibly any chapters until after I get back home. My itinerary forces me to rush from country to country and I will not likely have any quiet time to edit my pictures, organize my thoughts and write anything extensive. Hopefully I will find enough material to keep me busy producing new chapters for this blog during the coming year’s bleak winter months. (This assessment of the coming winter is not one of my unfair prejudices. I know what it will be like from actually suffering through winter here in fridgid upstate New York). 🙂