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Yesterday I found a travel piece about my hometown (ok, about the fancy town next to my hometown) in the Guardian. I’ve been out of the area for five years, but it was still a challenge to accept the premise of the article: That, after crossing an entire ocean, a commuter town in suburban New York is a place worth visiting.
While home, I’ve been trying to cultivate a traveler’s approach to living in America, trying to see the usual as new. The Guardian’s article makes me acknowledge a related challenge: Seeing a familiar place not just as a discovery, but as somebody else’s long-awaited destination.
It sounds like a silly game: Try to feel motivated to visit where you already are, and try to imagine arrival at where you’ve been all along. However, if you can override familiarity and view your hometown this way–while not under the influence of homesickness–you’ll find it easy to view anywhere in the world as a destination. Not just Bangkok and Bariloche and Mysore, but Harlowton and Shoptykol and Grooverville.
And when everywhere is a destination, all of a sudden every day is travel.
Photo: Happy on the floor by Satish Krishnamurthy via Flickr.
December 9th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
As a fellow Westchesterite, I loved the Bedford piece.
December 9th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
Love the idea of cultivating a traveler’s approach to living in one’s home town/country. I love that space you’re in when you return home, when everything usual is new–but it’s so hard to hang on to!
For what it’s worth, all efforts to promote my hometown (Oakland, CA) as a tourist attraction have been laughably debauched. Maybe it’s time we got a Guardian article!
December 9th, 2009 at 8:40 pm
Lauren,
The new Mother Earth News was praising your city. There’s hope yet.
December 9th, 2009 at 9:27 pm
Oakland totally gets a bad rap! My wife and I moved here in February of this year from Boston, and we love it. It’s such a diverse city, with everything from the huge cranes at the Port of Oakland, to horseriders trotting down the median on Skyline Blvd. It has vibrant ethnic areas like Fruitvale where we live, and any number of Vietnamese neighborhoods on the east side of Lake Merritt.
I don’t do this as regularly as I might like, but one of my favorite things to do is to just go somewhere I haven’t been. It’s simple, but picking a random BART station, or walking from your home in a different direction than you’re used to, one can discover new things about the place they live.
December 10th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
@Brian: Right on! I love how they hit up Pound Ridge Reservation…still one of my favorite spots in the world.
@Lauren: Thanks. Keep at it. How could anybody *not* want to spend time in the city that created Tower of Power?
@Ted: Cost of living in Oakland vs. Boston?
December 11th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
[...] post from earlier this week, “Everywhere is a destination,” struck a familiar note with me. I live in a popular tourist town, and while I love where I [...]
December 14th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
WORD!!!!