Randi Kreiss

Ready to roll: What's in your 'go bag'?

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“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
—Mark Twain

First I dreamed it; then I did it. Now I’m packed and ready.

I came from a family of planted people. They lived their lives in one place, and wandered only as far as I-95 would take them — that is, to Florida and back and to Montreal and back. West was not on their map. Oceans were not to be crossed. Time zones were not to be breached.

But somehow — through reading, I suppose — I became enchanted with the idea of travel, and then the possibility, and then the actual moving out and away from 40.7127° N, 74.0059° W.

I know now that some people are travelers and some are not. It’s in our DNA, the stuff that makes us risk-adverse or bold, curious or content, creatures of comfort or beings born with a peripatetic soul, a kind of unquenchable wanderlust that keeps us wondering what lies over the horizon.

You know who you are. If you’re a traveler (as opposed to a tourist), you’re not put off by the Greek financial meltdown or an Italian rail strike or heat waves out West. You go. You are not intimidated by threats from ISIS or mean French taxi drivers or bird flu in Shanghai. You go.

As the novelist Cesare Pavese said, “Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things — air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky — all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.”

Over two years ago, we planned an extended trip that we took last November, touching down in various exotic locations within range of Al Shabaab, Al Qaeda and numerous other terrorist splinter groups. We visited the Maldives, the Seychelles, Madagascar, Zanzibar, Mozambique and the Emirates. Our ship was supposed to make a stop in Mombasa, Kenya, but the situation on the ground as we got closer was clearly very dangerous. The State Department had moved its personnel out of the city, and newspapers in Mombasa were reporting frequent attacks on Western tourists.

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