I have an insatiable desire to travel and discover new cities and countries. This desire is now a fundamental part of who I am, and it all started unexpectedly, on a sunny afternoon in London in 1999.
I was 32 years old at the time. I was doing I.T. work in the US office of a British company when I traveled to their headquarters for a week to support a project. The office was located in Guildford, a suburb about an hour southwest of London.
This was the first time I ever traveled for work. It was exciting. And it was out of the country, which made it seem even more exotic. Until that point in my life, I traveled outside the US twice. And in both of those cases, I was not wandering. The first was my honeymoon to a walled-off resort we never left alone. The other was a trip to Paris with my soon-to-be wife, which was wonderful. Having lived there previously, her familiarity and knowledge allowed her to show me around like an experienced tour guide.
This experience was going to be different. After the overnight flight from New York to London a car picked me up and whisked me to the office. When I arrived, a coworker handed me the keys to a car. It was my car for the week. This added fear to the exciting new experience as I didn’t know I would be driving.
Let Me Out of The Car
The first few days were uneventful, except for my short drive to work, which was stressful and challenging. I know how to drive a manual transmission car, but the combination of shifting with the other hand and driving on the left side of the road caused me great difficulty. On the first day, I drove around two consecutive roundabouts in the incorrect direction, much to the dismay of others sharing the road with me.
A few days into the week, one of my teammates drove us to a different office for a few meetings. This was a long drive and I remember looking out the window at the new environment around me. The meeting ended just after lunch and we were driving back. I had no idea where we were. I inquired and learned we were in a northern suburb of London.
We slowed to a stop at a traffic light on a busy high street, the kind every small town and neighborhood in London seems to have. At that moment, from out of nowhere, I became uneasy and consumed with the urge to get out of the car. I had spent a few days limited to a suburban corporate office and a hotel down the street from it, and now this new city was passing me by as we drove through it.
I didn’t have time to think or plan it. A sentence came from somewhere deep inside of me, and I spoke it out loud.
“Let me out of the car.”
My coworker was surprised, confused, and uncomfortable.
“What?”
“Let me out of the car here at the corner.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea? You have no idea where you are going.”
“I will figure it out. I will be fine.”
And with that, I jumped out of the passenger side door and waved goodbye not wishing to debate the topic further.
This was not something I had planned, and I had no idea how it happened. The whole conversation took only seconds and I was then on my own in brilliant sunshine on a busy high street somewhere north of London.
As these events occurred in 1999, I did not have the benefit of a smartphone. I didn’t even have a paper map. I decided I needed to go to central London, Big Ben and all that. I walked a short way and came across an Underground station. Surely this was the answer.
I studied London’s famous Underground map on the wall of the station, the passing of 25 years has caused me to forget the specific line or station I took, but those details are not important now.
What is more important is how I was comfortable, which I certainly remember. I was calm. I wasn’t concerned about getting lost. I bought a ticket and got on the Underground, as simple as if I had been doing it my whole life. It was all natural.
I was at ease, at home. To this day, the Underground map in London is a warm and comforting sight. It may as well be a “Welcome Home” sign. It is home to me, much more than my actual home. I am planning to try a tube challenge someday.
I spent hours walking the streets of London. It was a warm sunny, long summer afternoon. There are no cell phone pictures to immortalize the journey, no trail of any kind. I am relying on memory now. I should have written this story a long time ago.
I remember walking through Hyde Park, there were toy boats in a pond, and I stopped and sat at a table to rest for a moment. I was dressed for work in a wool suit, tie, and uncomfortable black lace-up wing-tip shoes, even though it was summer. These shoes were not made for long walks. As I sat at a table near the toy boat pond, I noticed for the first time how much my feet hurt. I have a perfect image in my brain of my feet in those black shoes on that warm sunny day next to a pond in Hyde Park, reflecting the sunlight. Despite my aching feet, I carried on.
I walked past Buckingham Palace and along the Birdcage Walk to Westminster Abbey. Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament were conveniently nearby. I remember Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly Circus, and crowds in Covent Garden. Sometime later I stumbled upon the roses of Regents Park.
It was all new to me, I did not want the day to end.
I rode the tube, I think to Embankment. I remember the sight of full pubs with after-work patrons overflowing onto the street near the station.
It was only then, as the sun was setting, that I realized I had to get myself back to where I was staying. When my spirit beckoned me out of the car earlier in the day, it had no idea how to get me back to my hotel. I had forgotten that I was staying in a hotel in Guildford, some unknown distance away. My car, nuisance as it had been to that point, was still at the office near the hotel where I had left it in the morning.
I reasoned there must be a train to Guildford, or at least I hoped there would be. Unfortunately, I had no idea where the train station was. I was walking from Embankment towards the Houses of Parliament again and couldn’t hail a cab. I started walking across the Westminster Bridge, it looked less hectic on the other side. I was almost across when I caught a London black cab’s attention and got in.
Years later I would learn of the legendary navigational abilities of London cab drivers, and the test they must pass to get their license, called “The Knowledge”. I got in and was nervous. I explained that I needed to find a train to Guildford. I believe he responded with something short like, “No problem”.
After that was the shortest taxi ride of my life, no more than 30 seconds. I was still settling into my seat when he stopped and pointed to a door in a dingy tunnel that did not look at all like an entryway to anything, and told me to go in right there. London’s Waterloo station was right in front of me when I got in the cab, though I didn’t know it.
I got out and tentatively went through the door and found myself in a busy station. As he promised there were trains on the departures board that listed Guildford as their destination. A visit to the ticket office, then a train ride, and a taxi back to the hotel, and I was done. I was surprised by how easy it all was.
I shared the story of my impromptu wander through London with my co-workers the next day. I was glad to have the experience, and nobody was too concerned that I was absent the whole afternoon. Thinking about it now, it would have been an extraordinary miss to have gone back to the office that afternoon. I don’t know where it came from, I had no plans to do it, it just happened. And in that moment, it was an idea that took over and could not be resisted.
The Effect on my Confidence was Immediate
The next day, after work was over I walked across the parking lot to my car for the week, my nemesis, the green Rover saloon with the manual transmission that had caused me so much anxiety.
The day after my London ramble I was full of confidence and a desire to roam some more. After work, I used the road map in the car as my guide and I just started driving, I am not sure in which exact direction, I just knew I was going away from London. I sped down country roads with all the windows down. It was a glorious summer twilight. The countryside in England was green. I was free and it was joyous. I smile now just thinking about it.
After a few hours, I stumbled upon an on-ramp for the A-road that I knew would take me back to the hotel. It was another accomplishment. Back at the hotel, I celebrated alone at the restaurant with some fish and chips and mushy peas, and a pint or two more than was reasonable. The song “Carnival” by The Cardigans was playing, I can hear it now.
I Changed For The Better
This experience changed me forever. It kindled a fire inside of me that is still with me every day, the desire to roam, to see new places. Seven years later in 2006 my wife and I turned forty and decided to commemorate it with a trip, a bit of an adventure. We packed up our young children and flew to London and spent a few days seeing the sights. Then it was the Eurostar to Paris, followed by another train to Switzerland where we visited friends.
That vacation became the blueprint for me, for how I want to see the world. I loved taking the trains across Europe, and so did my kids. We went back to London with our daughter in 2013. We wandered all over the city and took day trips by train to Stonehenge, Dover, and a short trip to the Harry Potter Studio. We stayed in a quaint apartment near the Earls Court tube station. I grew to love these new places, and navigating on trains and buses between them. I was at home, and all I remember was feeling that I belonged there.
In time, the kids grew up and moved out and we are now fortunate enough to seize opportunities to roam. We drove around Iceland, then Ireland. There was a train journey from Prague to Milan via Vienna, and Budapest. Ljubljana, Trieste, and Venice. In 2023 we took an epic train journey from Stockholm to Lisbon, with many stops along the way listed here.
Today, if I am not fortunate enough to be traveling somewhere far away, I am home thinking about or planning the next journey. I am restless when not in motion. My view of the world is very large now, and there are so many more places I need to see.
This desire must have always been inside of me. I am grateful that it bubbled up from inside of me one day 25 years ago on a drive across London. I am even more grateful that I honored and followed that voice.