DeRuiter - All over the place: adventures in travel, true love, and petty theft

THE PROBLEM WITH WRITING A book ostensibly about travel is that people automatically assume it falls into one of two categories:

1. It is somehow informative.

2. It involves a button-nosed protagonist nursing a broken heart who, rather than watching The Princess Bride while eating an entire five-gallon vat of ice cream directly out of the container while weeping (like a normal person), instead decides to travel the world, inevitably falling for some chiseled stranger with bulging pectoral muscles and a disdain for wearing clothing above the waist.

Let me disabuse you of each of these notions immediately.

First, this book will likely teach you very little about the places mentioned herein. Despite having spent the last half decade in the state of transient unemployment known as travel blogging, I am woefully unqualified to provide any useful information in that regard.

I cannot tell you how to find the best restaurant in Rome or where to get the best rate on plane tickets, nor can I provide any historical context for a single geographic location without wandering into the fictional and oddly perverse. (Did you know that the Washington Monument was built to subtly ridicule our first presidents shockingly angular wang? I have never been to the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which is probably for the best.)

There are plenty of travel writers and personalities who have covered all those important topics in the travel realm far better than I could (even if I were sober, and not drunk on sugar and the intoxicating power of having ones own blog, as I usually am). They even cite reputable sources beyond the Internet and I think I saw it on Jeopardy one time and Shut up, dickface, its totally true.

If that is what you are seeking, I recommend the work of the inimitable Rick Steves, the apotheosis of all travel writers.

Steves has made a career of helping the hapless travel the world, and his guides are useful if you actually want to know something about planning a trip or finding your way through a foreign country.

I feel that I must take a moment here to say that while I respect him for his travel prowess and will begrudgingly admit to even having benefited from it on occasion, I am automatically disdainful of people who know what they are talking about (mostly because I so rarely do). Consequently, I have described Steves as a human turnip, John Denver minus the sex appeal, and a toe with glasses. (I know these are unkind things to say, and insulting someone based on their appearance is wrong. By way of explanation, Im kind of a horrible person.) I might also be slightly jealous of his sheer popularity. Not to mention, this is a man who named his book series Europe Through the Back Door and then didnt even have the decency to make them the least bit pornographic. I just cant condone that sort of wasted opportunity.

Second, while most travel memoirs would dictate that I find love somewhere along the way, that was not the case for me. I met the love of my life long before this story began, on the bastion of romance that is King County Metros 43 bus, under flickering fluorescent lights, surrounded by drunk college kids. As one does.

And I do not think one could call the love of my life chiseled. But he has twinkly eyes and puts up with my insufferable jokes, and he makes a good schnitzel. (Thats not a euphemism or anything. He really makes a good schnitzel.)

Also, my nose would never, ever be described as button-like.

So if this book by a travel writer is not about travel or about finding romance somewhere along the road, then where does that leave us? These last six years have taught me a great number of things, though being able to read a map is not one of them. I still have only a vague understanding of where Russia is, but I understand my Russian father better now than I ever have before. I have learned that at least half of what I thought was my mothers functional insanity was actually an equally incurable condition called being Italian. I have learned about my family and myself, about brain tumors and lost jobs and lost luggage and lost opportunities and just getting lost, in countless terminals and cabs and hotel lobbies across the globe.

And Ive learned what its like to travel the world with someone you already know and love. How they help you make sense of things and can, by some sort of alchemy I still dont quite understand, make foreign cities and far-off places feel like home. How days roll into weeks and months and years, and during that time you will fight and scream and laugh and cry with them, possibly all at once. That you can see so much of the world, and realize it is far bigger than the two of you, and still somehow feel that your love, squishy and imperfect and mortal, might be a story worth telling.

So, if there is any advice I could dispense, it would be this: its absolutely incredible, the things you can learn from not having a clue about where youre goinglessons that emerge after making a wrong turn, or saying the wrong thing, or even after accidentally doing something right. And in my case, this was all undertaken not in the company of a new love, but one that has enough miles on it to circle the earth three, maybe four times, is now sufficiently jet lagged, and lost its pants somewhere over Greenland.

I offer these minor epiphanies to you with the caveat that you shouldnt try to replicate the circumstances that led to them. Learn from my mistakes, but do not repeat them. Doing the latter will almost certainly result in unintended consequences, in particular petty theft, destruction of private property, low-blood-sugar-induced screaming, and flooding a boutique hotel room in New York City with a deluge of putrescence so heinous you will consider crafting a new identity to escape it.

But most notably, if you follow my lead, you will get hopelessly, miserably lost. As in, I may have just crossed over an international border without realizing it lost, or I have never seen any of this before and supposedly this is my hometown lost, or that panicky I think I accidentally entered a magic realm via a portal in the back of a wardrobe sort of lost.