For a while, now, since late summer of 2023, I’ve been planning on traveling with Blaze to do the Hadrian’s Wall walk. It mostly follows the old Roman wall built across the narrowest portion of England.
I’ve bought books for it. I determined that we wanted to do it on our own, and not via a tour group. I figured out our travel plans, where we would stay at every part of the walk, how many miles we’d walk every day, and so on.
I had it on my board for the last couple of weeks to do the last bit of planning, to go ahead and actually buy the airplane tickets.
I never did it. Something was holding me back.
I wanted to travel. OMG. I’ve always called myself writer/traveler. Traveler has had the short end of the stick for some time now.
And while the Hadrian’s Wall path sounded fabulous, would be a lot of fun, and would fulfill a lot of different buckets, I still couldn’t take the plunge.
WTF?
Finally figured out what it was. Of course, it wasn’t merely one thing, but a combination of things.
First of all, the money. Yes, travel is expensive. We would be taking more money out of my retirement to pay for the trip. So we could do it. But it felt like too much money for what we’d be doing.
Because honestly, what would we be doing? Hiking through the countryside for eight to nine days.
It wasn’t travel—the UK isn’t different enough for me to consider it travel. It wasn’t vacation either, though, not with all the walking.
In addition, there was all the training that we were going to have to do to be able to walk ten miles a day and not die. I’m not twenty (or even forty) and able to just pick up and walk like that without some training beforehand.
Recently, I’ve started writing again. REALLY writing. As in, 3000 words a day on a regular basis writing. If I look back at my tracking spreadsheet, I haven’t managed that sort of word count for a few years. I’d be able to do it in spurts, but not regularly. Not like I’m doing now.
If we did the Hadrian’s Wall path, I’d be giving up some of those writing hours. They’d be taken over by the training.
Inner writer was saying HELL NO to that.
I’ve just started writing—DO NOT put the brakes on.
However, I still want/need to travel.
Where should we go instead? What should we do?
Blaze originally suggested Costa Rica. We have friends down there who we could visit.
However, after looking it over, it didn’t appeal to me. Didn’t seem to call to me.
So I proposed instead that we go back to our original plans, plans that I made back in 2020: that we go to Guatemala instead. I have all the books already. I already tentatively made a plan for where we were going, and what we’d do.
It will be a lot less expensive to travel to Guatemala, as well as to stay there. We’re both going to have to be careful about what we eat, but we should be fine. I believe the phrase sin cebolla will be used frequently, along with sin champiñon (hongos) and sin queso. Plus, we’ll bring antihistamines.
Guatemala would be travel, not vacation, not how I travel. Get low to the ground and go.
It’ll give me a chance to practice my Spanish, which I think will be awesome.
I’m now making plans for us to go to Guatemala. I haven’t bought tickets yet, and I haven’t made final arrangements. But I’m really excited about the possibilities. Much more so than I was with Hadrian’s Wall, particularly at the end.
ETA: I have bought the plane tickets!
So, come with me on a new venture! Let’s go to Guatemala!
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