Ennis - Travel every day : transforming your life with the trip of a lifetime

Travel Every Day

Transforming Your Life with the Trip of a Lifetime

John Ennis

Copyright 2015 John Ennis
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 1502584093
ISBN 13: 9781502584090
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014917718
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
North Charleston, South Carolina

Dedicated to my wife, Ruth Brown, for her perfect companionship at home and abroad; to my friend John Ebel-Davies, for opening my eyes to international travel; to my brother, Kevin Ennis, and my friends Matt Hammond, Betina Piqueras-Fiszman, Thierry Worch, for providing valuable feedback throughout this books development; and to my parents, Daniel and Patricia Ennis, for encouraging me to explore the world.

Why This Book Exists

I have a full-time job, a house that Ive invested a lot into, and a large group of family and friends who are connected in various ways to Richmond, Virginia. Thus its a challenge for me to travel for any extended period of time. But I also love to experience new cultures and to expand my awareness of the worldthis book contains my solution to the problem of how to travel every day when youre connected to a specific place and cant practically take to the road full time. Ive used the principles of this book to enjoy numerous international trips and to study a multitude of languages; they reflect years of experiences and lessons learned, sometimes with great effort or cost. My hope in writing this book is to share with you these lessons so that you can form your own experienceswith minimal effort and cost. This book represents a great passion for me, and its my pleasure to be your guide as you learn to Travel Every Day.

How to Use This Book

The Travel Every Day approach has three main components, the first of which is learning extensively about the culture of your destination. Language learning will be a key aspect of this component, which well cover in depth. In particular, I expect that youll be happy to discover that language learning is much easier than you were led to believe in high school. The second component of Travel Every Day is the extensive planning process that leads up to actually taking your trip, and the third component is your actual trip. The secret of Travel Every Day is that by using your trip to motivate your cultural learning, planning, and education, youll not only make your trip fantastic, but youll mentally travel to your destination every day.

To get the most out of this book, I recommend you read it in its entirety before finalizing your travel plans. Each chapter begins with a portion of the fictional journey of Mark and Hannah MacDaniel, who plan a trip to Holland using the Travel Every Day approach. Their story will help make the concepts of the book more concrete. The story of Mark and Hannah is then interspersed with my own advice on how to best plan your trip. At the end of each chapter is an exercise, called a Mental Voyage, that I recommend you do at the time of reading, with the exception of the tenth and final Mental Voyage, which should be done after your trip is completed.

A Note on the Pictures in This Book

All of the pictures contained in this book were taken either by me or by my friends on some of the various trips Ive been fortunate enough to experience. None of us have any special photographic trainingthis is just how beautiful the world is. We hope you enjoy the show!

Contents

Preface

Ill always remember my first major international trip. It transformed my life, but I only begrudgingly agreed to go. My friend John was planning a graduation trip to England, Italy, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, and the Czech Republic for himself and several of his friends. I was finishing up a graduate degree in mathematics, and the last thing I wanted to do was think about anything other than my June 4 defense date. John invited me to join him on his adventure, and I declined. Unperturbed, John asked if I would take him to shop for a backpack for his trip, and I agreed. The store he wanted to go to was an hour away and, the entire way there, John did nothing but talk about his plans. He told me about the caf culture in Rome, the art in Florence, and the architecture in Barcelona. He told me he couldnt wait to ride a bicycle along a canal in Amsterdam. Although my parents are from Ireland, and I had lived in Ireland when I was very young, I had never been out of the country as an adult and I didnt appreciate what John was talking about. What I could appreciate, though, was his enthusiasm. John is a very excitable person, but his excitement in this case exceeded anything Id seen before from him. As our drive went on, I began to think John might be on to something. By the time he began to shop for his backpack, I was close to being sold on joining him, and when we walked out of the store together on that beautiful, sunny afternoon, I had more than a new backpack of my own; I had also begun to open a door that would eventually allow an unbelievable amount of life into my world.

Ill always be grateful to John for helping me open that door. Traveling internationally is, in my opinion, one of lifes most enriching activities. Since that amazing trip with John, Ive traveled internationally numerous times and have made traveling a major part of my life. Every trip Ive been on has taught me lessonssome major, some minor, but all important to some degree. In particular, Ive learned that planning a trip to an international destination and then organizing my life around the preparation for that trip, partly by learning the language of my destination, helps complete me as a person and connect me to the world. Every day, for me, is a little journey to my next destination, and this fact has made my life immeasurably more enjoyable. And even better, this enjoyment has been magnified when Ive been able to include people I love on these journeys.

This book aims to do for you what my friend John did for me. I want to help you open the door to the world, and its my pleasure to share what Ive learned with you.

John Ennis

Chapter 1

A New Beginning

Travel is more than the seeing of sights. It is the change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.

Miriam Beard

8:35 a.m., July 1, Richmond, VA

What could Mark do? He had felt stuck in his life for some time now. He was of course fortunate to have a dependable job as a software engineer and a loving wife in Hannah, but he had been feeling for a while that something was missing. He just wasnt satisfied with his life of writing software code, going to the gym, coming home to eat dinner with Hannah, then watching TV and falling asleep. For some time now, he had felt like a passenger in his life instead of the driver. As he arrived at his desk that morning at Integrated Software Solutions, he put his coffee down and flipped the month from June to July on his office calendar. July 1another half year completed. He looked at the calendar, with its images of palm trees and sunshine, with a kind of longing. His life had been the same for too long.

9:10 a.m., July 1, Midlothian, VA

Hannah was just as unhappy as Mark, if not more so. Her job at The Sophisticated Gourmet Catering was comfortable, but it wasnt fulfilling. She loved her husband, Mark, whom she had met in college almost ten years before, but she felt their relationship was getting stale. And though they needed some new energy in their lives, they didnt yet feel ready to have children