The 40-year-old travel virgin

There I am. Yep, that’s me, taking a shameless selfie while walking through the streets of the lovely and lively city of Toulouse one morning, not to mention whilst carrying about 30kg total weight on my back and front.

Last week I wrote a story titled Post-pandemic travel and shortly after I realised many of my family, friends and followers alike were left wanting for more details about my little, big adventure. But before we get too far into it I need to cover a couple of key realisations and discoveries that have surfaced for me these past couple of months and set the scene for what’s to come.

Friends with?benefits

The first thing you need to know is who your REAL friends are. I’ll give you a hint, it’s not everyone on your Facebook friends list, or all of your Instagram followers, although your real friends might be there.

I was on the phone with one of my best friends the other day, a charismatic French fella from Lyon who’s currently living in my home country of Australia. As we spoke, I frantically described what seemed like every minute of my journey. Over the two-hour long conversation, where I started by asking why he hadn’t returned my calls, whilst knowing all too well that he’s just not one of those phone guys, he made it abundantly clear with his wonderful words of encouragement that he was overjoyed with the fact that I was finally out seeing the world.

This is what you call a true friend! Not one of those friends that gets all up in a twist and refuses to reach out to you even though they’re watching your every move. Those aren’t friends, you don’t need them and they don’t deserve you. The good kind of friends, like the three or four that I have, are always there through thick and thin, and always there to celebrate with you, console you or congratulate you depending on the occasion. This friend had seen me struggling for years and years with self-doubt, addiction, mental health issues and sometimes even just downright stupidity, but he’s never turned his back on me. He’s loved me when I’ve succeeded and he’s loved me when I’ve failed.

It got me thinking that if you attain nothing more in life, I hope you, YES YOU READING, get to experience the joyous, soul-elevating benefits of what it is to have a true friend in your life, one who’s always there (and yes dogs are absolutely counted). So before you set off on any life-changing experience, take inventory of those who appear on your friend's list, be honest about who really has your back, and pick a few good people who truly nourish your soul to keep in touch with and send postcards to.

Not quite 40, but still a travel?virgin

Another key realisation is that society’s norms and expectations will weigh on you. The more you travel the more you’ll realise that there are fewer and fewer people out there like you, willing to ‘risk it all’ and take a leap of faith for adventure’s sake. You’ll need to try to find your own way of coping with these pressures and feelings of isolation. I’ve been trying something lately called ‘not giving a f**k’, which is why I often walk around in bright red socks and Birkenstocks. You’ll soon realise that no one else out there in the world gives a f**k what you wear and do either and that most of these perceived expectations are just a figment of your imagination.

Over the years, it seems that I’d been able to peddle every excuse in the book for why I wasn’t ready to travel, but not a single good reason (at least in my mind). Maybe that’s just me being too hard on myself again, maybe I need to practice being in the moment and letting go more. And why should it even matter right? I mean, as I told my best friend the other day, “some people never grow up, they only grow old”, and that works both ways, so if you’re still young in body, mind, heart and soul, why not just go for it?

Now that I’m almost 40 there’s an ever-increasing feeling that our time on this earth is finite and that I might want to consider going out into the world and making some new friends while I’m still able to stay up past 9 pm. Embarrassingly, by the time this journey came to be, the passport I’d arranged back in 2012 was almost about to expire, uncreased and stampless. But I’m glad to say that now the feeling of guilt from seeing it staring back at me every time I opened my top drawer has expired with it.

More salt than?pepper

The third realisation is that you should have some clarity around where you’re at in life, what you’re looking for and what you have to offer.

While I’d been travelling for at least the past couple of weeks, it has occurred to me that I am, for the most part, significantly older than most of the people that I was encountering in the various hostels that I was staying in. You can probably tell, right? I mean the beard is looking more salt than pepper these days, and I’m getting to that age where if you don’t watch your diet, you have to stand back and watch what your diet does to your waistline (hardly a good time to be travelling through the land of wine and cheese??).

This realisation changes the game somewhat. For a start, every time you find yourself being woken up by someone snoring loudly, you genuinely have to ask yourself if that someone may have been you. You also find yourself quickly friend-zoning younger women that seem to take a keen interest in you in these hostels, especially when you realise that they were born the year you finished high school, lol.

If you’re out there trying to hold onto your youth in some way, let it go, or you’ll just be denying yourself some potentially richer, more fulfilling experience that could be right under your nose.

Alright already

Enough reflections! I hope what you just read made you feel some warm and fuzzies or at the very least laugh out loud. And after all that I never actually got to why and how this whole crazy adventure started. But for that my friends we’ll have to wait?:)

Let me know your thoughts! Do you have a Bff who’s always there for you? What are you delaying? And are you ready to do the thing you’ve always wanted to do?

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My name is Lui Diaz; I’m a children’s author, illustrator, skateboarding teacher, and podcaster, not the kind of guy whose words you’d normally be reading. But if you’re looking for new perspectives and the odd laugh, you’re in the right place! Please subscribe here or find me on?Substack?or?Medium?for more lighthearted and evocative content :)