I decided to go to Portland on a whim. I would take the bus down, have dinner, stay the night with a friend, and take the bus back the following day. It was not a big deal; it is 200 miles from my house in Seattle to downtown Portland, a three-hour drive on a good day. Portland is appealing, but hardly exotic, to a person from Seattle.
Nearby, there was a musician playing jazz standards on the saxophone.
I had an overnight bag, a very good picnic, a cell phone and a bus ticket. I was traveling absurdly light, and that was a joyful feeling. My husband dropped me in Chinatown, too early, so I sat in my favorite tea shop, eavesdropping, reading, and watching the winter sun come through the front windows. Then, I shouldered my little overnight bag and walked six to eight blocks to the wrong bus stop. I stood in front of a mural of Bruce Lee for five or 10 minutes, until I noticed my correct bus stop across the street. Nearby, there was a musician playing jazz standards on the saxophone. I tossed the change from my coffee into his open case and then crossed the street as my bus appeared.
My feeling of excitement was well out of proportion to the nature of the travels at hand, but I didn’t care. Adventure is in the eye of the beholder — or rather, the heart, as it beats faster when something exciting, different, and out of the norm is about to happen. And if it seems crazy that a woman who has run a team of sled dogs across a frozen lake in the Yukon in February, or got lost in the temples of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, could feel her heart race while boarding a bus to Portland, well, it is. Sure. But also, it isn’t.
Because it was new, even if the route was familiar. It was an adventure.
Normally, my husband and I drive the highway together. We are often off to points south of Seattle — we have family in Oregon in Portland and Eugene. We know where to stop to get the best sandwiches and the best cookies. The bus wouldn’t stop at all — it was a direct line to downtown Portland — and I was alone. This was different.
Adventure is in the eye of the beholder — or rather, the heart…
I sat up front, in the seat with the best view, gazing out the window at the wetlands north of Olympia, at the girders of the steel bridges, at swampy, green fields flooded by recent rains. The landscape looked different to me from my leisurely perch. I could imagine I was going somewhere new, where anything could happen.
Travel magazines and television shows like to make adventure travel seem like something other people do, people with stronger backs and knees, people who have received many vaccinations for exotic and dangerous diseases that will stay with you long after the trip is over. There is no denying that this type of travel is adventurous indeed, but the risk of bodily harm — frostbite, malaria, dehydration — or petty crime, like pickpocketing, is not a required component of adventure travel.
Anything that shakes up your daily routine and requires you to engage in something new is an adventure. A new restaurant that serves a type of food you have never before eaten. A walk in an unexplored nearby park known for its wetland birds. A last-minute unplanned getaway on your own to have dinner with friends in a nearby city. No special equipment required.
Anything that shakes up your daily routine and requires you to engage in something new is an adventure.
I am an adventure traveler. I love traveling to faraway exotic places that are hard to reach. I do not require much comfort; I will sleep on a camping mattress and go without running water. I am happy to head out onto the streets of a city I do not know, where I do not speak the language. But these things are not what define the adventure aspect of it. Adventure is everywhere.
There is a park near my home. It is full of old growth trees and little creeks run through it. And though it is right off a major arterial, as soon as you leave the parking lot, you are transported to a place that feels like deep forest. One afternoon as I walked the quiet trails with a friend, the park began to fill with Ethiopian families, dressed head to toe in white. It was a beautiful scene, the dark green forest filled with people who seemed to float through the trees.
My hiking friend and I were transfixed. The celebrating Ethiopians looked otherworldly in this place we knew so well. Everything had changed with their arrival. We asked two teenage girls to explain; one translated for the other who was not comfortable with English. It was Meskel, an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian festival that would culminate in a huge bonfire on the meadow in this park not two miles from my home. We had traveled across the planet to a culture unknown. My car was a few hundred feet away and my neighborhood coffee house just over there from where we stood, yet we had been transported to a completely different world.
When my bus arrived in Portland, I headed to a coffee shop to wait for my girlfriend. We went to dinner that night, a long walk the next day, and then, I took the bus back to Seattle. My husband picked me up at the bus stop in Chinatown, and we went to dinner.
“How was it?” he asked.
“It was a great adventure!” I said. I meant it.
