Saturday, April 28, 2012

Take off.


an·glo·phile/ˈaNGgləˌfīl/

Noun:
A person who is fond of or greatly admires England or Britain.
Adjective:
Fond or admiring of England or Britain.
This is, most simply, me.

I've always wanted to go to Europe. To Edinburgh, Scotland, where Hogwarts is. (To pick up my late letter, but of course.) To Amsterdam, Holland, where Hazel and Augustus (from The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, I highly recommend it) escaped from their harsh realities. To Kensington Gardens where Peter Pan is. To King's Cross station, to greet Harry and the others coming back from Hogwarts.

I am so strongly influenced by fiction literature, and I thrive on novels I can dive into and enter a whole new world filled with new surprises, new people to grow to love, new adventures to experience. All throughout my imagination. But recently, I've developed a sense that just reading about these travels isn't enough. I want to live them.

In the book Thirteen Little Blue Envelopes by Maureen Johnson, the story follows Ginny, a girl whose aunt has given her, you guessed it, thirteen blue envelopes to travel Europe, reading the envelopes step by step and following only the rules set in the letters. I want an adventure like that, being able to just take off with my goodbye being, "I got sent on a solo adventure and I'm taking the challenge. Don't know when I'll be back, bye I love you!" And then off I would go by myself to the airport, flying across the sea to an unknown kingdom far, far away.

Sometimes, when I contemplate this, I have to slightly doubt myself, for the sake of reality. Would I be able to do it? I'd like to think that I could. Yet the longest I've been away from home was a week at my church camp, a place I could almost regard as another home, now that it's so familiar to me-the people included. Of course, I think I'd have to have something to document the experience-a video camera, a still camera, a never-ending travel journal filled with vast scrawls of my adventures. I think I'd be fine without a phone, as long as I had the ability to send letters home to the ones I love.

I suppose I could do it. Wouldn't it be nice, to get away? To have just the right amount of money to take off on a silver bullet, to land in an unknown destination where they would force you to get off the plane and step out into a new realm. Is it odd, though, unrealistic, for me to love a pure idea, hardly thought out and formed in my brain?

Could I do it?

1 comment:

  1. Great post!
    It's my dream to travel around Europe, but I'll probably be too broke in the future, and my parents hate leaving the county.. It's a shame, because I live in Ireland, where we get to see the flash of Europe from afar, but it's too far to swim across. Oh, well.
    Great post :)

    ReplyDelete

Commenting on my blog can give you magical powers and prevent osteoporosis. So why wouldn't you comment?