I Travel 365 Days A Year: 5 Bizarre Things You Learn | Cracked.com

I Travel 365 Days A Year: 5 Bizarre Things You Learn | Cracked.com

I lived this life myself for about five years, although my travel was more global than the author's. My experiences were not always like his. I'd normally be in a new place about two weeks and the locals would generally ignore me on nights and weekends, leaving me free to compile my reports and sightsee a bit. So I did get to see the famous sights in all the places I visited, although I spent most of my time talking to manufacturers, wholesalers, and gas station owners, or just wandering around and observing the everyday retail environment. (My field was convenience stores and my clients were oil companies.)

I'll tell you the one thing always on your mind when you travel the entire world: you live with one main fear - that you will get really sick in a place with third world medical care. Luckily for me, nothing ever went wrong in places like Papua New Guinea or Zimbabwe, but I once got a bad case of dysentery in Venezuela, and that put the fear o' God in me, because I got a glimpse of how bad things might have been with a worse medical problem in a more primitive place.

For me, the worst part of that life was not when I was in it, but when I left it. Living the life is not so hard because you're so busy that you don't have time to feel sorry for yourself, so you just stay focused on your job and watch the months, then the years, go by in a flash. But imagine that you sleep on airplanes, or in hotel rooms and corporate apartments 330 days a year for five years, and then you want to stop and try to live a normal life somewhere. How do you begin?

That was the hard part. I moved to Austin, Texas, where I had maintained a little apartment, but essentially knew nobody, not even in my apartment complex, because I was there maybe 30 days a year, and even then was always trying to spend time with my young son from an earlier marriage. Besides, the apartment was just me and a whole bunch of University of Texas students, so anyone I met was likely to be gone before my next visit. The women I had been involved with over the years lived no closer than Cincinnati (she was a German-speaking flight attendant I met on a flight from Frankfurt), and as far away as Glasgow, Oslo and Budapest. I went to Cincinnati a few times, and I actually flew to Budapest for a "weekend" which consisted mostly of plane rides. I adored that girl in Budapest, and it was a great weekend, but I could see that wasn't going to be a practical solution going forward. She didn't speak English and wasn't coming to the States, and I sure as hell wasn't going to live in Hungary. (Why couldn't she have been Italian? I'd have moved there in a flash, assuming they'd have me.) I had to face reality, resolve to remember her fondly, and then force myself to start from scratch. I was fortunate, in that I didn't have any really horrible dating experiences, other than the usual awkward mis-matches. I made a solid connection with about the 20th woman I dated; I ended up with a daughter who has been one of the great joys of my life; and I became Uncle Scoopy. That's a happy ending, but I know damned well just how lucky that was, and I would not want to go back to those months when I first returned to the States.