Getting Out of Dodge
On times we've taken breaks from our previously scheduled lives to try out different ones, in other locales. An open thread.
Readers,
I hadn’t originally intended to make this any kind of official Travel Week on Oldster.
Due to some scheduling mishaps it was something of an accident that two days apart I featured an essay on being a middle-aged nomad by, and an Oldster Magazine Questionnaire by , a seasoned world traveler who at one point home-schooled her kids while globe-trotting through 14 countries, and who has recently refocused her website, NextTribe, on travel for women 45 and older.
Ironically this occurred in the midst of my own midweek escape with Brian to an inn 20 minutes from home—a brief, much-needed change of scenery during his unanticipated week off between jobs, which slowed us down, chilled us out, and cleared our minds a little bit, preparing us to meet the next big things on our plates with fresh eyes.
I’m glad this scheduling mishap occurred when it did, because it got me thinking about the benefits of temporarily escaping your life to sample another one. It’s amazing how a couple of days in a different place can refresh your mind and outlook. But how about a couple of weeks…or months…or years?
I know from personal experience how much getting out of Dodge for a while can broaden your perspective, shift your state of mind, and more generally change you, most likely for the better. Taking in new vistas can cause you to re-evaluate your priorities and your choices, leading to fresh choices for the rest of your life, from a newly informed worldview.
As always, I’m curious about your experiences, too. So, I thought I’d ask about times in your life when you picked yourself up and took off, for any period of time—whether of your own volition, or as a result of external forces—and how it affected you and your life, going forward. Tell me in the comments…
“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”
― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky
It’s been a long time since I ditched my little world for another. That kind of thing was much more possible for me in the 90s when I was in my 30s, single, and freelancing as a writer and editor. My life was already unsettled and chaotic, so what was a little more chaos thrown into the mix? (As I’ve described myself in that period of my life before, I was sort of a grunge-era Tinkerbell, traipsing around the Never Never Land of the East Village with a string of Peter Pans in old 501s, threadbare concert tee shirts, and Chuck Taylors.)
On a whim, between gigs, I took a two-week trip to Greece and Turkey using Pan Am frequent flyer miles I’d accumulated at an old job, staying in cheap, dodgy B&Bs—for example, the one in Thessaloniki that turned out to also be a brothel. Before leaving home I managed to score an assignment to write about researching my Sephardic roots in those countries—only to have the publication fold shortly after I filed my piece.
A year later, the morning after a painful breakup, I grabbed one of the fringed edges of an “AirTech” flyer on a telephone pole on the Lower East Side advertising “courier flights”1 to Europe for $100 each way. I called my friends stationed in Paris and asked, “Hey, remember when you invited me to come visit? How about later today?” After which I high-tailed it to Kennedy Airport to catch a 1pm flight.
My longest and most transformative escape occurred after another messy breakup. In June, 2000, I rented out my rickety fourth-floor walkup for ungodly Dot Com Boom money, and decamped to Rhinebeck, New York, where I became housemates with another woman my age, also in the midst of a breakup.
Initially the arrangement was meant to be for just two months. But it was so healing being away from my city life, taking everything more slowly upstate in the country—making new friends, focusing on my own writing for the first time, starting a weekly writers’ group—that I kept extending my stay.
I was gone a full year before my building’s super called to warn me that the landlord had been snooping around, asking if I still really lived there. It was time to go back to the city. Twelve months after my departure, at 35-and-change, I returned home a slightly different version of myself, one better equipped for the new choices and challenges ahead of me. Most importantly to me, I’d transformed into a different kind of writer, one dedicated to personal essays and memoir, the work that has always mattered most to me.
What’s more, I learned from my time in Rhinebeck that I liked upstate living enough to choose it again. In 2005, when Brian and I were being evicted from our apartment in Alphabet City, we moved to greater Kingston, right across the river from Rhinebeck. We’ve now been here for 19 years.
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By the way, other Oldster contributors have written about shaking up their lives with travel—Diamond Michael Scott wrote about his ongoing nomadic existence, and Chip Conley wrote about visiting 16 countries in a year.
Okay, your turn. In the comments, tell me about a time you took a vacation from your life, short or long, that changed you.
“Courier flights”—through which you could travel cheaply as the passenger assigned to some important piece of cargo in the plane’s hull— stopped being a possibility after 9/11 and Homeland Security.
Last summer, I went to Santa Fe, NM by myself for a week. It was the first time I'd traveled alonesince my husband was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease in 2018, began early retirement (at 55) in 2019, and was diagnosed with Parkinson's Dementia in 2021. For an entire week, I was able to remember what it felt like to be a person who was not focused on providing medication, keeping track of where my husband was/what he was doing, worrying about blood pressure dips (and the falls that come after them), etc..
I went to museums. I looked at art, sat in the park and listened to music while eating ice cream. I talked to local artisans about their work process. I sat in old churches and felt the energy of millions of prayers washing over me. And I met a lot of women who, seeing a gray-haired sister on her own, asked to join me and ended up telling me their stories.
When I came home at the end of the week, I knew I had to hold on to the rediscovered feeling of having an independent self. The first step was to start seeing a therapist; then I arranged for some help with my husband's care. I'm still working on carving out the space I need to keep living my life, but that trip to Santa Fe changed everything.
I lived for 35 years in one of the 88 cities in Los Angeles county, a hotbed of political activism, and I was a longtime community leader. When I turned 70 I picked up and moved to a town in northern California that is big enough to have all the necessities but a completely new political and social scene. Both my adult children live here, and I wanted to move while I was still young enough to make friends of my own. It was scary to leave my life behind, but it is so liberating to start fresh! I'm able to continue working remotely as much or as little as I want to, and the insane price I got for my house near the beach allowed me to buy a house here without a mortgage. After almost 30 years as a struggling widow I am moving into a manageable retirement that I never thought I would have, and I'm doing it as the person I have become.