Nearly two decades ago, I wrote and directed a video called Slow Travel. The concept involves grabbing a day pack, a change of underwear and a bank or credit card then walking out your front door on a two week vacation. The goal is to refrain from using the combustion engine in order to travel. We traveled all around middle Tennessee without the use of a car. It did not involve a whole lot of walkin … you will have to check our online newspaper in order to follow the story further or watch any of the video clips.
Slow Travel did not start out as an idea. It started out as a personality trait.
Due to a club foot in a cast, I spent the first two years of my life in a stately parade, atop shoulders, hips, and prams. With plenty of time to drink in my surroundings, I developed a predilection for dawdling.
“Come on pokey!“ My mom would exclaim. I tended toward entropy. Watching the way the sun refracted through the windshield, I had to be pried from the car.
I was always the last to leave the lunchroom. The playground. I made friends with the ants on the playground. I was the last on the school bus and the last one off at my stop.
My parents were military, so I had the great good fortune of two adventurers for parents. We spent my tweens in India and Nepal, dawdling through open markets, underwater schools of fish, on trains, boats and on foot through the Himalayas.
Even on foot, I felt we were moving too fast. While trekking, I stopped to join a village dance. My dad had to backtrack to find me.
Once free of parental constraints, the condition worsened. Defiant, I knew I was onto something. I just couldn’t explain what that something was. Many years later, after several adventures with my beautiful, rescued English Shepherd, and a mate who loved to take the Blue Highways in his tiny Geo Metro- (50 mpg folks), I came up with an idea. Slow Travel.
Please join me online at thecontributor.org as we go about traveling without the use of the combustion engine. It will start out as a blog, then graduate to a vlog.
We will take bicycles, stilts, kayaks, glider planes, sailboats, and maybe cheat a little and take a train. Some journeys will cover one whole foot of distance.
You may remember that a couple of decades ago everyone was running around pell-mell to their destinations. The idea of slow travel was inconceivable. Then COVID-19 happened. I think the time has come to look at our way of approaching the world.
Come and learn how to dawdle. Or just come to be validated for who you are .…