Travel for people who hate travelling

Shoutouts to Google Maps

People are often surprised when I tell them I don’t like to travel. I’m a homebody through and through. Honestly, it’s not that I don’t like to experience new places and see the world, but the act of travelling for me has always been such a chore.

I don’t fly well. Like at all. Plane seats are uncomfortable. Everything is too cramped. Sometimes I don’t get the window seat. The list goes on. I also have a lot of bad memories associated with the actual act of travelling. There was the time I almost shit my pants in the Houston airport. There was the time I flew back to Canada from Argentina with a vicious cold and felt like my head was going to pop like a balloon for the entirety of the 12 hour flight. There was the time my plane got lost over the Pacific Ocean and I was never seen again. It’s all minor inconveniences for the most part, but my sensitive self hates them.

So I found a solution - I cut out the actual travel and I just play Geoguessr now.

My god, I am addicted. There’s so much possibility with so few stakes. Travelling before was an ordeal for me until I actually got to the destination, settled in, and learned about my surroundings. Now I just click a button and boom, I’m there. Where is there? Who knows? Malaysia? Latvia? A dirt road in the middle of Argentina? Been there, seen it, didn’t leave my couch.

Is this South Dakota? Missouri? Who knows.

Yes I know these experiences don’t truly compare to the real thing, but they allow me to appreciate a different aspect that not everyone gets while they travel - the minutiae of all these different places. I love how different streets twist and turn in different ways. How the vegetation hangs over the road in a different way in each place. I find the completely pointless details endlessly interesting. The signs are always different colours, the houses sprout from the ground at different angles, the light hits the sidewalk differently in England than it does in Botswana.

I’m a scholar, I enjoy scholarly pursuits.

This is a fundamentally different experience from travelling. You’re not going to the Taj Mahal or the Grand Canyon, you’re going to places you never would imagine - Fayetteville, Arkansas, Chikura, Japan, Orta Nova, Italy. You look at all the tiny structures and details that make up the world - the grocery store, the bus stop, the intersections in the middle of one horse, half horse, and quarter horse towns and you think to yourself “there’s a huge world out here, and I can maybe even be grateful for it sometimes even though things kinda suck right now.”

That right there is worth the price of Geoguessr pro right there.