Superman has Kryptonite. It seems I have the Grand Canyon.
Any time Superman comes within a few feet of the celestial green crystal it manages to wreak havoc on his otherwise superhuman body. Likewise, any time I come within a few hundred miles of the giant chasm’s earthly red rock, a similar havoc is wreaked on my far from superhuman body.
After returning stateside a few weeks ago, I decided to tempt fate by returning to the canyon lands of the Southwest in an attempt to finish the trip I started there twelve months prior before it was abruptly interrupted. After six months traversing the globe, setting foot on, in or near a multitude of earthly wonders, I thought there no better way to close out my adventures than by finishing my pilgrimage to perhaps the pinnacle of them all, the Grand Canyon.
Unfortunately, my latest attempt only served to further cement the big ditch as my personal nemesis. I made it as far as the cosmopolitan mecca of Omaha - for a Mother’s Day visit to see my Grandmother on the way west (you’d think I’d get some karma points for that) - when an almost forgotten, but instantly recognizable pain began to spread across my lower back. I held out hope that it would be a quickly passing storm, but once my nearly ninety-year-old Grandmother began to outpace me walking through the local JC Penney’s I knew ten days hiking through the remote deserts of Arizona & Utah was ill advised.
It’s the fourth such attempt to visit the Grand Canyon that’s been thwarted by equally bizarre circumstances in the last decade. While a fortnight later I’m once more reasonably agile, I’m not quite up for tempting fate a fifth time and exposing myself yet again to the ominously debilitating and discouraging powers of the Grand Canyon.
So my trip ends on a bit of a whimper, literally and figuratively, yet it’s near impossible to complain in light of the string of remarkable destinations that have not managed to elude me over the last year. Plus, I consider myself fortunate to be able to designate two weeks traveling through some of Italy’s greatest cities with my parents as my de facto grand finale.
But, finale may be the wrong choice of words. I prefer to call it just a pause. While I was lucky enough to return from my globe hopping sans any exotic diseases, I did come back with one incurable condition: chronic wanderlust.
Like an addict, I’m ready for my next fix immediately and am willing to go to significant lengths, and distances, to find it. Despite setting foot in a considerable number of countries on this trip, I recently determined that it only constitutes a mere 6% of the nations of the world. Such information only feeds my addiction, but how or when I’ll be able to seek out my next fix remains a looming, nagging question as I currently find myself at a unique crossroads: what to do next?
For the last year, my answer to that question would be to simply pick the next destination that caught my fancy and book a ticket to get me there as soon as possible. But, with an exhausted budget and a credit card balance creating its own layer of stratosphere, it seems that it’s not so simple this time (or is it?). Prudence suggests that it might be time to look at returning to the real world.
However, I think I left my pragmatism somewhere in New Zealand when prudence was also telling me it’s not so smart to leap from a perfectly good cliff into a deathly deep canyon attached to nothing more than an over sized rubber band.
After a year like I’ve been lucky enough to experience, my definition of the ‘real world’ has changed significantly, and continues to evolve, which adds layers of complexity to such a seemingly logical decision. Not to mention that there are a myriad of personal endeavors, business and otherwise, swimming around in my head that I’m wont to at least explore if not pursue earnestly before settling back into the real world.
Where I’ll be and what I’ll be doing in the next few days, weeks and months is anyone’s gues, least of all mine most of the time. But, I‘ve become pleasantly accustomed to that lifestyle over the last twelve months. One thing that is certain about my future is that I’m not quite done with this blog just yet - ever, if I‘m lucky. I still have excursions in Spain and Italy to chronicle as well as a few other topics that I couldn’t quite get around to while I was traveling. Plus, who knows what other adventures may lay in store to be recounted here at a future date.
Should I find a moment of clarity and come to a decision about my future, - whether employment, travel, or a mixture of both - I’ll likely record that here too. So keep watching for at least a little while longer. Just don’t expect to see a post about me curling my toes over the rim of the Grand Canyon any time soon.
