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From: Stephanie Elizondo Griest
To: Terry Ward, Catherine Watson and Liz Sinclair
Subject: Ode to the Mother Road

Thanks, Terry, for the assignment: convincing Kate and every woman out there to hit the road sola, at least once in life.

I have spent much of 2007 crisscrossing the nation, holding Traveling Sola workshops for women. The first question I always ask is: “Who here has wanderlust?” Every hand blasts skyward. Then I ask: “So why are we here instead of out there?” The responses are myriad, but they boil down to this: “We are waiting” and “We are afraid.”

First, the waiting. Traveling is highly subject to postponement. We wait until we finish school before commencing our big adventure. We wait until we’ve paid off our college loans. Until we’ve paid off our mortgage. Until our kids (dogs/ferrets/ferns) are grown. Until we’ve retired. Until a travel partner comes along.

At some point, we must ask ourselves: Is that day ever going to come? And will we still be wanderlusty when it does?

The time to travel is when you have the desire, the dream, the hunger. The time to travel is when you pass the night poring over blogs like this. The time to travel is now. And—to paraphrase Thalia Zepatos—if you are waiting to find that perfect travel partner, take a look in the mirror and get out your passport.

Now for the Fear Factor. This one is huge. As women, we worry about getting lost. About growing lonely. About being mugged, kidnapped, raped. I have embarked on six major journeys and—in the days before my departure—was terrified I might never return. How did I overcome fear? By writing a will. That’s right. At the ripe age of 33, I have six versions of my will, neatly labeled and tucked in a drawer. Somehow, writing those final farewells frees my mind and enables me to go.

The scariest part of traveling is everything you must do prior to boarding that plane: carving out the time, shoving your belongings into storage, quitting your job, buying your ticket. But once you are physically on that plane, you’re golden. You’re ordering gin and
tonics, flipping through guidebooks, drawing up plans, dreaming. And then you’re stepping off that plane and beholding the jungle, the ocean, the mountains. The glorious people you’ll soon be meeting. Before you know it, you’re traveling; you’re transcendent. You have joined Mother Road.

Be forewarned that traveling will alter you in profound ways. Upon returning home from a four-year journey around the communist bloc, I discovered that all of the identities I’d spent a lifetime cultivating had peeled off one by one. My vegetarianism drowned in
a bowl of yak penis soup in China. I compromised my feminism by allowing a Russian boyfriend to treat me badly. I never felt less Latina than in Cuba, where my Tex-Mex Spanish was barely intelligible to the people with whom I so badly wanted to connect.

But that’s what Mother Road does best. She pushes you to your physical, spiritual and psychological limits—then nudges you one step further. She teaches you to be self-reliant and self-sufficient, which in turn makes you self-confident. Under her guise, you’ll
soon be strolling the world’s passageways with confidence. You’ll understand the difference between being alone and being lonely, and will grow more selective of your company.

So GO! Far. Wide. Now.

Part One: “He My HUSBAND”
Part Two: The “Feminine Card”
Part Three: Arguments and Getting to the Heart of the Subject
Part Four: Being a Woman—Wherever
Part Five: Settling Down on the Fringe
Part Six: Wanna See My AK-47?
Part Seven: Loosing Gender
Part Eight: The Home Dilemma
Part Nine: Girl Power, and the Get Up and Go
Part Ten: Ode to the Mother Road
Part Eleven: (De)Parting Words
Part Twelve: Hitting the Road

About the participants:

World Hum contributing editor Terry Ward writes for many online and print publications, including The Washington Post, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, the Orlando Sentinel and AOL. Her favorite destinations for traveling solo are Morocco and anywhere in Europe or Southeast Asia. A story she wrote about a women-run guesthouse in Rajasthan, India was selected as notable travel writing for the 2006 edition of the Best American Travel Writing series. She is based in Florida.

Catherine Watson is the former travel editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, a winner of the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalist of the Year and the author of two collections of travel essays, the new Home on the Road—Further Dispatches from the Ends of the Earth, and Roads Less Traveled—Dispatches from the Ends of the Earth. Her latest story for World Hum is Where the Roads Diverged.

Stephanie Elizondo Griest has mingled with the Russian Mafiya, polished Chinese propaganda and belly danced with Cuban rumba queens. These adventures inspired her memoir Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana and guidebook 100 Places Every Woman Should Go. Atria/Simon & Schuster will publish her memoirs from Mexico in 2008. An avid traveler, she has explored five continents and once spent a year driving 45,000 miles across the United States, documenting its history for a Web site for kids.

Australia-based Liz Sinclair is currently living in Bali, learning Indonesian, volunteering as a grant writer for a maternal and child health center for the poor and writing about Australia and Asia, with an emphasis on Indonesia and interfaith issues. She wrote Why I am Still Going to Bali for World Hum, and has written for The Melbourne Age, The Big Issue, Australia, The Brunei Times, The Evening Standard and Islands magazine.