I don't know if I'm cut out for traveling at this point in my life. I like to do exciting things, I guess, but I also know that I feel a sort of guilt about luxury, especially the unearned luxury of merely being born into my family. Especially luxury in a hiatus of searching for a career. I feel a strong sense of guilt over this trip, and my aunt casually telling me to spend more and do more varying things with this time ("You only live once") only makes the guilt stronger, especially as she tells me about how "one of her conditions" for this trip is to start over from a disappointed career as an artist. Now, spending money isn't going to help either of our coming job searches, but, then again, wasting a trip on hotel rooms seems worse. That's why my favorite outdoors pastime is probably hiking (on this trip, usually on straightforward paths or even along roads cutting across the mountains of Italy and Greece).
There are no airs in hiking, no real worries about how I'm dressed or groomed. There are no veneers of authenticity, no pretenses of locality, no luxury, and most of all, no forgetting myself and no escaping myself, neither of which I want. Just a couple buses at beginning and end, some fraction of a marathon's distance taken at 3 of 4 miles an hour (with frequent pauses), some fun sights for my eyes and fun grades for my feet. I don't need scuba dives, or gondoliers, or whistling a happy tune at a bar late to give me what could only equal the ecstasy, engagement, fatigue, and meditation that hiking can.
