When I was a kid, our family had a topographic map of the United States above the dining room table. The mountain ranges stuck up off the map, the middle shockingly flat next to the Rockies. It was the best piece of decor that ever happened to me. We would spend night after night talking about travel. Our parents told us about how in 1973, before my brother and I were around yet, they loaded up their mustard colored Ford van with camping gear and their black lab, and spent three months adventuring across the U.S. and back. We heard stories from that trip for years growing up, and with each telling, I started collecting my own list of places I wanted to see. In the early 80s, we took a three week road trip in our wood paneled Buick station wagon, up the Pacific Coast to Vancouver, B.C. and back. In 1989 we took our first flight as a family, to Hawaii. In 1993, our first overseas adventure, to England and The Netherlands. That map became a planning tool, but more than anything it triggered a passion and curiosity for places not yet discovered.
You’ve heard of wanderlust, yeah? It’s the German word meaning “a great desire to travel and rove about”. The Germans must really love their travel, because they have another, lesser known word: fernweh. This word embodies what that map ignited in me as a kid. Fernweh is not just a desire to travel. Fernweh is “an ache for distant places; the craving for travel”. An ache. An emptiness exists without it. I found a blog post that explains, “Wanderlust means the desire to travel. Fernweh elevates that urge to a need. [Some] say it is the opposite of homesickness. That means one feels sick when at home too long; lethargic and sad. A person who has fernweh feels best when not at home.”
A word. For a thing that just seemed simply like a gut feeling my whole life. This was actually a thing! It helped me understand why I always need to have a trip planned. It brought into clear focus why, while so many people I knew felt incomplete without a significant other, I felt incomplete without adventure on the horizon.
At least, this was true until the summer of 2015, when #ayearontheroad began……the adventure I called #followingmyfernweh.
Photo Credit: PartyInked, Etsy Shop
Following My Fernweh 