Next stop Paris
World Hum, which claims to be home to "the best travel stories on the internet", and actually does run some decent stories occasionally, has helped propagate this wonderful piece of comic banality by one Caitlin Rolls, originally put online at Thought Catalog. Rolls, you see, went to Europe for two months to escape her "disturbing ambivalence towards post-grad life", and it was, well, kind of a drag and not that much different from staying home, except you have to spend all this money on airfares and shit.
Travel’s not what it’s cracked up to be, despite the musky tents in Morocco and the paisley sarongs (Where can you buy one of those?), and most people are "afraid to admit that they came home exactly the same person they were when they left". Rolls certainly did – although arguably, even if she’s not quite aware of it, rather more cynical than when she left. But she did learn some things: she doesn’t like one-night stands, a lot of people overseas are as boring as the ones at home, sightseeing can get to be a drag … oh, and you’ll probably miss peanut butter.
It’s easy to poke fun at Rolls – check out the long queue of comments at the end of her piece – until you realize that she’s actually nailed something in a Holden Caulfieldish kind of way. The modern travel experience is not a life changing experience. As she puts it, the most you should expect is a few really good nights with the right kind of people "and even though you could all be intelligently analyzing the situation in Libya everyone has decided to just laugh and have a good time instead." And here’s the clincher: "It’s basically a really, really expensive trip to a really, really cool bar."
And that’s about it really. The "trail" has become thoroughly democratized and commercialized. It’s not the end of travel – travel is still possible – but most of the people who think they are doing it are simply on the road to the next really, really cool bar.