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Home » How To Bring The Joy of Travel To Everyday Life: Don Lamp (Transcript)

How To Bring The Joy of Travel To Everyday Life: Don Lamp (Transcript)

Read the full transcript of Don Lamp’s talk titled “How To Bring The Joy of Travel To Everyday Life” at TEDxTAMU 2024 conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

The Gift of a Lifetime

DON LAMP: Would you like to take a year off and travel the world?

I was on a 12-hour shift at the hospital, walking down the hall. The double doors opened and my cell phone rang. It was a detective.

“I’m calling about Joy Cunningham.”

“Yes,” I said, “that’s my aunt.”

“I’m sorry to tell you, she’s passed. We found her in her bed. I understand you’re next of kin.”

“Yes.”

“Could you come out to Orlando and take care of things?”

Only 10 months earlier, I had gone out to Florida to help my Aunt Joy put her estate in order. She was in her mid-70s, but as spry and flirtatious as ever.

She was so grateful for my help. Since her husband and only son had died years earlier, she made me the executor and sole beneficiary of her estate. I was sure she would live well into her 90s, a classic beauty with a feisty independence. I was shocked she had died.

And here I was, 50 years old, having just received the gift of a lifetime. Weeks later, a spark of fantasy caused a flash of inspiration in my mind. I turned to my wife Mimi. “How about we take a year off and travel the world?”

My eyes were wide with the sudden possibility of it all. I could see the frugal wheels turning in her head. “If you don’t want to go, that’s fine, but I’m going.” As I spoke the words, I knew they were true.

After a long silence, Mimi’s eyes brightened with a little impish smile. She replied, “I’m certainly not going to sit here at home and read your postcards.”

The Grand Adventure

Six weeks later, we boarded the train in Palm Springs, California, and headed out over the wide open spaces of America: San Antonio, Texas; Chicago, Illinois; on east to Washington, D.C.; and down through the southern states to Miami, Florida. Then we went international: the Caribbean, the Galapagos, Machu Picchu in Peru, and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.

From Argentina, we flew to South Africa. We traveled over land for 2,500 miles in the back of a truck from Cape Town to Mount Kilimanjaro, which I was fortunate to climb.

Leaving Tanzania, we flew over the Sahara to Morocco. We took the ferry across the Straits of Gibraltar, leaving Africa behind us as we disembarked into the dazzling European playground: London, Lisbon, Barcelona, Paris, Venice, Vienna, Prague, Berlin, Budapest, and all the rest, and finally, Moscow.

We rode the Trans-Siberian Railway across Russia and Mongolia down into the heart of Asia: Beijing and Hong Kong, Vietnam and Cambodia, and on into the exotic South to Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. Next came Australia and snorkeling the Great Barrier Reef, then over to New Zealand, Christmas in Tahiti, and with the start of the new year, Fiji, Samoa, and north to the Hawaiian Islands.

Landing in Seattle, we ferried up the Inside Passage to Skagway, Alaska, and finally, back on the train down the beautiful Oregon coast to California and home.

It was a year to beat all years. 50,000 photos, mind you. 365 days, 73 countries, two months in every continent, one grand circumnavigation of the earth.

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The Unexpected Reality

I just knew when I got home, I would be a sensation. I would be welcomed with a ticker tape parade like an astronaut back from the moon. I was asked to give a slideshow at the Second Wednesday Women’s Guild at the local community church. And then, crickets.

I mistakenly believed that all my small-town friends and acquaintances were breathlessly following my world tour. Many of them really didn’t even know I’d been gone. When I’d tell them of our trip, they’d say, “Oh, I was wondering why I hadn’t seen you around lately.”

I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to feel. The brilliant future I’d imagined over the past 12 months was diminishing and fast. It was a false future, propelled by the applause of an imaginary audience. But instead of enthusiastically continuing my daily blog, I shut it down.

Even though I had just completed the greatest thing I could have ever imagined doing, it was over. The fantasy vanished, and I grudgingly returned to my regular life, feeling somehow like a failure. I sat for hours, day after day, the weeks turning into months, head down, doodling with pen and ink on small squares of watercolor paper, swirling spirals of tangled symmetries, indecipherable, inconsolable, full of emptiness. All I wanted was to get back on the road.

I unfairly blamed Mimi for her lack of enthusiasm, for her unwillingness to admit that our lives had changed, that we didn’t have to go back to what we were before. We were globetrotters now. Deep inside, I knew she was right, that she was clear-eyed and grounded, but I didn’t want to accept it. She flew back to Florida to get our inherited houses ready for renting.

I rode my motorcycle across the country, trying to get my mojo back. In Florida, I was no help. I was a dark presence, an angry, pouting toddler. She suggested I go home.

So I saddled up for another 3,000 miles, road warrior, drifter, lost. I settled into a blank-faced resignation, my heart heavy like a funeral. Mimi returned home a few weeks later and strongly encouraged me to go back to work and go get that master’s degree. But even after I was working again and studying again, something had changed in my mind, like a boiled egg sent back to the carton.

I blended in just fine, but I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t figure out what was happening. I knew something was different inside me. I couldn’t get back to that dream self I had created.

The Seventh Continent

I wanted to be that man I was when I was traveling.