{"id":12725,"date":"2015-10-09T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-10-08T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.intrepidtravel.com\/adventures?p=12725&preview_id=12725"},"modified":"2024-09-18T12:46:24","modified_gmt":"2024-09-18T02:46:24","slug":"travel-itch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intrepidtravel.com\/adventures\/travel-itch\/","title":{"rendered":"Why we sometimes lose the travel itch (and how we can get it back)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I can\u2019t remember exactly where in China I was at the time, but perhaps it doesn\u2019t matter.\u00a0My seven weeks travelling through the country had become a bit of a blur anyway. I was on a train, my ass parked on an unforgiving bench with a cup of salty noodles for lunch (again) and a bottle of 2.5% beer to wash it down.<\/p>\n

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And it was on that train, somewhere in China<\/a>, that I decided I wanted out.<\/p>\n

This was the life I\u2019d chosen. It was the life I\u2019d left\u00a0a decent job in Vancouver for: spend six months on the road throughout Asia en route to a year in Australia. This came after year-long stints in Eastern Europe and Istanbul<\/a>, respectively. It was the life friends from home in Toronto would sometimes tell me they were envious of.<\/p>\n

\"norway---thomas-frost-jensen\"<\/a>

A travel itch is the one itch you don’t want to go away. Image c\/o Thomas Frost Jensen, Flickr<\/p><\/div>\n

So how, with nothing to do but make it to the next strange, foreign city and try to create memories, do you reconcile the fact that you do not want the life you\u2019ve chosen? That free of the burdensome obligations your friends back home complain about, those very obligations actually bring a sense of calm you haven\u2019t felt in months?<\/p>\n

Even if the next stop in China brought delivered on the\u00a0visceral and cerebral highs that travelling is supposed to, all I wanted was a comfortable couch, a hockey game on TV and a cold, Canadian-brewed beer.<\/p>\n

I told my girlfriend that whatever happened in Asia and Australia<\/a>, I wanted to move back to Toronto afterwards. Travelling now felt like the burden I needed to avoid. Unsurprisingly, I decided at the end of our seven weeks in China to end my trip\u00a0early, forgoing a planned few months in Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia.<\/p>\n