The Unexpected Twists and Turns of Life

I set out upon my travel adventures this year with the goal of untapping some hidden career as a travel writer. It was my goal to maintain my blog and the associated social media and to use this time to reflect upon life and my priorities and where I saw myself in the future.

After Ohio, I headed to California, where I had about a week up north (two nights in Sacramento, and five in San Francisco). Sacramento was okay... pretty boring, but I feel like going to the capital of California was important to do



California State Capitol, Sacramento

The Bay area is one of my favourite parts of the world, along with New York City. I spend a day down at Stanford University, I spent time across the Bay in Berkeley, I frantically rushed around SF proper, catching as many cable cars and using as many forms of the convoluted public transport system as I could.


UC Berkeley entrance

View of San Francisco from Treasure Island... no really, from Treasure Island!

Cable Car turnaround

Then it was onto Washington State where I spent almost a week staying with a friend in Tacoma. After an action packed experience in the Bay area, Tacoma was the embodiment of relaxation. My friend and her roommate had just moved into their apartment a few days earlier, and they were themselves catching up on lost sleep and exhaustion. We sat around, chatted, drank diet coke, played with the cat, watched movies, went on small trips to visit family and look around where each of them grew up. Leaving Tacoma was hard, probably the hardest farewell of all my travels.

The flight from Oakland to SeaTac was the most beautiful flight I've ever experienced

One of about a hundred photos I took of the cutest kitten in the world.

Addiction, much?

Such an iconic landmark

 

I spent my last six days in Los Angeles denying that my travels were coming to an end, just trying to live in the moment and experience some different things. I was thrust into the world of PR, I was taken to staple American places that I simply 'had' to experience ("You haven't been to The Cheesecake Factory?!") and I ate. A lot. I hardy took any photos, but I feel like I truly lived.

Universal CityWalk

Seeing Jamar Rogers, from The Voice, at Universal CityWalk

Penny was not at The Cheesecake Factory, but this amazing cheesecake was!

Chateau Marmont - wish I could've gone inside!

To be quite frank, my blog and this universe was the last thing from my mind.

And I think it was then that I decided.

I love travelling, I love writing. But the “me” who I was looking to unfold didn't exist. For me, I prefer creative writing. My last couple of weeks of my travels were all about me, and about what I wanted to be doing, the experiences that I wanted to be having. And in that process it became clearer to me that this blog had become somewhat of a chore. However when the siren sounds, when my muse hits to write a piece of creative writing, to work on my fiction... it's like nothing can stop me from doing anything but living and breathing my characters and their world.

Travelling is a huge part of who I am, and I think somewhere along the way I was mixing up the notion of passions and trying to force a passion onto myself to make sense of my life. The skills and experiences I gain from travelling are transferable into real life, and travel has unveiled for me a passion for an industry that I wouldn't have had without all my experiences abroad – the overall travel and tourism industry. Here I was trying to take travel and work and writing and all of the parts of me and to put them into one box – be a travel writer, that'll make you happy.

Turns out that human beings are multi faceted and while this seemed like a grand idea at the time, in practice, I know that it isn't the kind of life for me in the long term.

And so, upon returning home, I found myself being thrown back into the mundanity of life and trying to find employment. A tough gig. My chosen profession is human resource management and because I sit at the more so entry level end of the spectrum and the employment market presently sucks, this was a depressing month and half of looking for employment. I always knew that the kind of employer who would take me on would be the kind of person who appreciates me as a wider human being, who appreciates me because of ALL of my experiences, including the time I was lost in Liechtenstein and the day I nearly hyperventilated on the New York City subway and the night I spent at Newark Airport befriending random strangers.

And it turns out, that I was right.

Because today, I have signed a contract which is going to take me in a direction which simultaneously terrifies me and excites me.

I am moving to Alice Springs for a role as a HR Coordinator in a big multinational hotel chain.

Alice Springs in practically in the exact centre of Australia. It sits about halfway between two of the state capital cities – Darwin in the north, Adelaide in the south – about an 18 hour drive to either one. It is literally in the middle of the desert, in the middle of nowhere.

Pretty much all of Alice Springs.

I've been all around the world – I've climbed the Eiffel Tower, I've seen the Grand Canyon, I've seen Niagara Falls, I've stood in awe looking around the Colloseum.

But in my own country, my lack of travel experience is rather frightening. I've never been further inland than the three hour drive from Sydney to Bathurst.

I still have wanderlust, I still have this need to see and explore and discover the universe, and in turn, find out more about who I am.

It's just that the next segment of my life is going to be going about exploring this wanderlust in a different way. Who needs to get a working visa in the UK or Canada, when I can experience one of the most desolate places on the planet in my very own country?

Moving to Alice Springs is something that I never, ever would have anticipated doing. It isn't an opportunity I would have sought out. But I like to believe that the universe works in strange ways and that opportunities get presented to you sometimes which you just need to seize and leap without looking.

I'm intending now to use my @lightsallfaded Twitter account as a tool professionally and to muse upon my experiences dealing with relocating and adjusting to this brand new life. I may update my blog every now and then, but without any sort of pressure that I 'must' update at a particular time.

And, I'm planning to work on my first original novel. I'm told that there isn't much to do in Alice Springs, so I may have some spare time up my sleeve!

It's funny how things work out sometimes, in ways that you never anticipated, and yet somehow they just make perfect sense.

“Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.”

~ Dr. Seuss.