Remembering Why I Travel

Sometime after 8am, Air Canada flight 864 landed at Heathrow airport in London. I’d spent the entire flight asleep after taking some pills to knock me out for the redeye flight. If you’ve never been to Heathrow, the airport is huge and when you land, there’s a lot more to getting to your hotel than just walking outside and getting a taxi.

There’s quite a long walk from your gate to the customs desk where you have to see a customs agent and explain why you are in the country. It’s about 10-15 minutes of walking through the airport, then however much time you need to stand in line before seeing an agent. Once through there, I don’t go out and hail a taxi as the fare from the airport to my hotel is always overly expensive so I take the Heathrow Express train into the city then a subway or Uber/Taxi from there to my hotel. That’s another 10-15 minute walk to the train station, plus the time you wait for the train, plus the time on the train into the city which is about 20 minutes. This time I opted for a taxi to my hotel and it took almost an hour to get to where I was staying given the traffic and layout of the city.

By the time I got to my room and all checked in, it was pushing towards 11:30ish, maybe even closer to noon. I unpacked a bit, layed down and had a nap then sometime after 2pm I woke up and decided to do my regular work trip ritual.

I’ve got video here which shows my typical “business trip” routine which always includes going from my hotel to my client’s office on the day of my arrival. I’m not really one who wants to take any chances and not be able to find where I’m going on the first day of class, so I always make a visit the day before just so I know how to get there. After waiting for the ferry attendants to come off their break, I finally got on the boat, shuttled over to Canary Wharf, and walked to the DLR/tube station to catch another train into town. I found my client site and then opted to spend some time in the city since I had made the trek already. I decided to do some geocaching and figured I’d take a bus to get me closer instead of doing a lot of walking. Sitting on the top level of a double-decker bus, I had a nice realization.

In 13 years of working in a technical/training role in the legal industry, last year was a year that I did the most traveling. By the end of 2018, I had clocked in 96 flights for work which according to Kayak (which I use to track my travel) that equates to about 116,600 miles. That’s roughly four and a half times around the planet Earth. By the time September rolled around last year, I was starting to feel a bit burnt out and needed some relief. I love traveling and I love to see new and interesting places, but when you have a year like I did last year, it’s pretty easy to feel a bit overwhelmed by being gone so much. I found myself becoming less and less interested in going anywhere and not really feeling like travel was something I was as big a fan of as I was at one time. But then Sunday happened…

I was looking out the window of the bus, watching the pedestrians walk along the streets of London. The architecture of many of the buildings here shows the age of the city and it’s always a pleasure to be in the presence of such history. But as I’m watching people cross the streets and the little black taxis whip around corners, I had a moment of contentment that I had not experienced in a long time.

You wouldn’t know it from what I write here, but over the course of the last six months, I’ve done a lot of complaining and belly-aching about being on the road. But sitting on the bus, I realized that I hadn’t been looking at the other side of that coin. I’m in London England. Someone else paid my flight, my hotel, and my meals for me to be here for a week. It’s Sunday and I have the whole day to do whatever I want and I have no restrictions as long as I make it into work the following day. I’d been complaining so much to friends and family about work that in a way I had forgotten about how lucky I am to have the opportunities that have been given to me when it comes to seeing the world. I really should be more appreciative of what I have rather than complain about what I don’t have.

Places like London remind me that even though much of the travel I do is to very mundane and forgettable places, I do get the “good” trips from time to time and those experiences should be the ones that I focus my attention on. Sure, I don’t want to be traveling as much as I did last year, but I am feeling a bit better about what I get back from it compared to what I put into it.

So for now, I’m going to enjoy the rest of my week in London knowing that I get home Saturday afternoon and will be home for a spell before heading off to Toronto to have someone else teach me something for a change.