Six Things I learned in Three Years on the Road: Resourcefulness

The defining characteristic of travelers who successfully spend months or years on the road is not their resources, it´s their resourcefulness.

The dictionary defines resourcefulness as “the ability to deal skillfully and promptly with new situations and difficulties.”   Resourcefulness is not a theoretical concept.  It arises from challenging situations and problems.   In other words, you learn it when your ass falls off and your hair is on fire.

For me, the appeal of travel has always been its unpredictability.  My Spanish teacher recently gave our class a list of disasters and asked us to talk about which ones we had experienced.  I had experienced all of them, plus a few that were missing.  Earthquake? Alaska.  Hurricane? Hong Kong.  Plague of insects?  Kenya.  Military coup? Thailand.

Before I started the first leg of my trip around the world, I planned each week carefully, with great attention to detail.  My first stop was to be a work exchange gig in a chateau in the Loire Valley in France.  Then I planned to hike 791 kilometers of the El Camino in Northern Spain.  Afterward, I planned to study dance for six weeks in London before returning home for Christmas.

It was buttoned down.  Nothing had been left to chance.

My entire plan fell like dominos less than 10 days after arriving in Europe.  The work exchange gig in France was a bait-and-switch scam. The place was a sweatshop. Workers didn´t live in the chateau, they lived in the barn.  Instead of six hours a day, five days a week, the owners expected 10-hour days and some of the workers had not had a day off in six weeks.   The operation was run by a chain-smoking wreck of a woman whose husband had developed dementia and was given to wandering around the grounds naked.  When he escaped, the staff had to catch him so he could be medicated and put to bed.

I left that mess, figuring I´d start hiking El Camino early.  However, the day I left the chateau, there was torrential rain and flooding in the Pyrenees Mountains. The region was declared a national disaster area.  Hiking that part of El Camino was impossible.

My glorious plan was in ruins.  I spent three days cold and dreary days in a hotel room in a small town in France, listening to the rain, having panic attacks, and trying to figure out what to do.

Resourceful people tend to be goal-oriented, creative problem solvers.   I blew into a paper bag and pulled up my goals for the year on my laptop.

My goals included studying Spanish, dancing, hiking El Camino, expanding knowledge of world cuisines and learning more about the Arab Spring.

What if I threw out my bucket list and used these goals to travel, I wondered?

What if my goals became my compass?  What would that look like?

What happened was that I fundamentally changed how I travel.

Rather than go someplace because it was on a must-see-before-you-die list, I began to evaluate places by whether they were healthy, walkable, creative environments for learning.

El Camino stayed on the list since it would eventually dry out and become passable again.  In the meantime, I decided to go to Southern Spain to study Spanish and dance.  In Sevilla, I joined an African dance group.  I bought castanets and studied Flamenco.

I wore flowers in my hair and walked everywhere.

I decided to go to North Africa.  I took cooking classes and spoke with Muslim women in their kitchens about the Arab Spring.  I wore an abaya and a hijab so that I could blend in and travel more freely.  I came away with recipes and a unique, feminine perspective on current events in that party of the world.

When the Camino dried out, I hiked it.  On the last day of the hike, I developed a hairline fracture in my talus, or heal bone.  There was no way I was going to be able to dance in London on that foot.  I could barely walk.

Another domino had fallen.

Back to the drawing board.

“You are 85% water,” I told myself, “Flow around it.”

What could I do in London that didn´t require a lot of walking, I wondered?  I looked at my goals again.  One goal was to start drawing and painting again.  I had a BA in Fine Arts, but over the years, I had gradually stopped doing anything creative in order to focus on a career in research.

I discovered that the National Gallery offered artists stools so they could sit while they drew.  I hobbled to the art supply store a couple of blocks away to buy drawing supplies, hobbled back to the museum and claimed my stool.  I drew at the National Gallery every morning and late into the night in my room.  In the afternoons, I sat in the pews of cathedrals and listened to concerts.

I decided to visit libraries, another good place to get off my feet, I figured.  In a library near Saint James, I saw a man was sitting by a northern window.  The light was spectacular.  He was dressed in a long blue canvas workingman’s coat and a blue watchman´s cap. It was a scene that Vermeer would have painted.

I introduced myself and asked if I could photograph him so that I could draw him.  I explained about the problem with my foot.  We started talking.  He was intelligent and very articulate.

The gentleman was homeless.  He belonged to a book club made up of other homeless men.

They were reading the Russians.

Would I like to join them?

I would indeed.

It was an amazing experience.  The guys turned me on to the British Film Institute, where a membership included access to viewing rooms.  The rooms held small groups of people.  We viewed films from a collection of thousands of the best, award-winning films from around the world.

We spent several rainy afternoons together watching movies.

They smelled like wet dogs.

I loved every minute of it.

I flew home to the US for the holidays.

The next leg of my trip would be Asia.

Over the holidays, people asked me often about my bucket list for the next leg of my trip.

“I threw the bucket away,” I would reply.  “I found a new way to travel.”

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