“The day on which one starts out is not the time to start preparation”—Nigerian Folk Saying
In The Joys of Travel, Thomas Swick (2018) identifies seven joys of travel: Anticipation; Movement; Break from Routine; Novelty; Discovery; Emotional Connection; and Heightened Appreciation of Home. Similarly, Gretchen Rubin in The Happiness Project delineates four aspects of happiness as anticipate, savor, express, and recall. Whilst linear in some ways, these elements are iterative, too. For instance, happily, recalling previous trips feeds anticipation of the next.
From first learning about the Semester at Sea (SAS) program, through application, selection, and planning, we’ve been anticipating this voyage for nearly two years. Even for seasoned travelers, preparing to be away from home for four months was daunting. The pre-travel activities for this journey is not unlike those of our other trips, just heightened—especially with planning both personal and professional aspects.
Anticipation of the voyage brought mainly excitement, gratitude, and disbelief. (Is this for real?) It also brought feelings of nervousness. Like every new experience or endeavor, the unfamiliar and unknown can evoke concern and even fear—and, dare we say, feeling at sea.
Swick clarifies that anticipation is “rarely idle” (p. 3). That was certainly true about this process. From application to embarkment, preparing for the trip sometimes got downright laborious—with paperwork galore. Larry getting ready for the faculty role of SAS was an involved process of preparing syllabi, responding to increasing e-mails, finalizing paperwork, etc. Erlene’s focus on writing and project development involved figuring out what to take for creative, unanticipated developments. From getting immunizations, planning for minimal packing, finding someone to stay at Casa de Paz, to feeling sad about people we’d miss (especially Z & Noor), we sometimes wondered, “Is it worth it?”
Swick recommends immersing in readings, films, etc. from/about the planned destination, as anticipatory preparation. However, for a trip this involved, expecting to be prepared adequately felt overwhelming. We’re certainly planners—see our travel packing list, detailed itineraries, etc. But, we consider our best preparation is to recall that our most savored travel moments are unplanned. While planning, including reading and media, we resisted the temptation to strive for a “perfect” trip—remembering to savor the journey.
Our shared Word of 2019 is “Journey.” How apropos to be traveling on a German ship, MV World Odyssey, in which we traverse the globe. Swick writes that Germans are perhaps the “world’s greatest travelers” (p. 7) and German is the “language of travel” (p. 8). He expounds that Germans have a word for the intense feeling of excitement one feels before setting off on a trip: reisefieber, i.e., journey (reise) and “fieber” (fever). German language gives us wanderlust/wanderjahar and a word for the opposite of homesickness, fernweh, which describes “the yearning for elsewhere that haunts one while home” (p. 7). Thus, whilst anticipation included both excitement and anxiety, the haunting reisefieber and yearning wanderjahar are only remedied with the joyous jolt of travel.
