Confessions of a Travel Junkie

"I like songs about drifters - books about the same.

They both seem to make me feel a little less insane."

-"The World at Large", Modest Mouse

I'm a travel-addict. There's no denying that fact. I love to travel and when I don't get my fix, I start to feel a little on edge. I pace my apartment or take to wandering the neighborhood for hours on end, snacking on chocolate-covered raisins and coca-cola. I try to fill the void by binging on lesser addictions, like lattes, cookie dough or Sex and the City reruns. Or often I'll sit in bookstores for hours on end, pouring over stacks of Lonely Planet guide books. But nothing helps.

Ultimately, once that itch to travel has set in there's no stopping it. Whether it's six months or one year, there's just only so long I can stay in one place before I just have to leave. And then before you know it, I've booked a plane ticket I can't afford on my nearly maxed-out credit card and I'm zooming off to Thailand or Hong Kong or San Francisco.

In the last month, that itch has definitely set in. Big time. And I'm trying to fight it, I am. I wish they had a nicotine patch for travel-addicts or a 12 Step program. Or maybe some sort of posh, isolated rehab center in the mountains somewhere. It'd definitely be packed with former flight attendants and cruise ship employees and English teachers and there would probably be a ban on reading travel memoirs and the Lonely Planet Thorne Tree forum.

But sadly, no such support exists. A travel-addict is left to tough it out alone.

So I've designed my own, tailor-made rehabilitation program. I figure baby steps are in order, so my approach is a gradual cutback. Reannon's Rehabilitation Program will consist of the following steps:

A few week visit to the States, (New York, California and Las Vegas), followed by a brief stop over in Hong Kong and a possible hop over to South Korea...and maybe Thailand.

You see, it's not like I can quit overnight. I'm a true-blue travel-holic. With a mother as a former flight attendant and a father who's spends three out of every four weekends abroad, I've got the travel-bug running through my veins. I've been hooked on adventures in far off places since I was an elementary school.

It all started when I went on family vacation to Alaska when I was 11 and was nearly eaten by a moose. Well at least, that was the version of the story that I later told to a class of awed 5th graders.

The truth, of course, was a little different and a lot more boring. The fact was, the moose had been far more interested in eating the tree I was sitting next to, then munching on any part of me. But no one had to know that. As far as everyone else was concerned, I’d nearly died…I'd fought a moose and returned victoriously.

And from then on I was “travel girl”, like bat girl, only better. I may have not been the prettiest girl or the smartest but I was traveled. And when you live on an island surrounded by thousands of miles of ocean, this is kind of a big deal.

So what started as a role I played, snowballed into an identity and one that followed me through studying abroad in high school and college and beyond. Pretty soon, I wasn't sure who I was if I wasn't "travel girl". I worried that I'd be like Clark Kent without his Superman alter-ego; a weaker, uglier, dorkier version of myself.

So I continued to play the role, flying around the globe, conquering treacherous mountains and untamed jungles. And somehow traveling became the cure-all for all of my problems.

Bad break-up? Become an Au Pair in Europe.

Afraid of graduating college? Work on a cruise ship.

Lost a good friend? Backpack around Asia

It's only been in the last few months that I've begun to really examine this pattern. And I've realized that maybe this little love of travel I have might in all actuality be an elaborate method of avoiding painful situations.

And maybe that's not such a bad thing. I mean sure, chronic, continuous travel pretty much kills any chance of developing real relationships, roots or a career. But it's not like it's crack or even cigarettes. Travelling is good, right? Surely recovering from a travel addiction doesn't involve abstaining from travel all together, does it?

Shouldn't there be a way that I can strike some sort of happy medium between this nomadic, vagabondish existence and a life of stability and car payments and memberships to the gym?