Scaredy Cat Travels

(Originally written March 2023)

According to my countdown clock, in just 32 short days, Rowan, Jackson & I will board a plane bound for LA, and ultimately, Japan and South Korea.

It seems impossible.

The road from Texas to Asia has been a long one. This trip was originally supposed to happen in the summer of 2020 as a graduation present for Jackson. But we all know what happened instead.

I had started planning that trip in January of 2020. I bought a pretty notebook (the most important step in starting a travel plan) and by the end of February had mapped out most of the itinerary as well as set a budget. At the same time, Ryan was in the hospital with a chest tube draining blood from his right lung. If he hadn’t been so sick, I probably would have gone ahead and booked flights. But his continuing decline made me hesitant to finalize anything so expensive and so far away. Cancer is good at many things, but its specialty is removing any sense of confidence in your decisions about the future.

Ryan recovered, as he always seemed to, but then March hit. I remember telling my mother about two weeks into quarantine, “They’ll have this pandemic thing figured out by the summer!”. I sheltered in place, wore my mask, washed my hands and stayed stubbornly in denial until the end of May. Denial is one of my specialties. Take that, cancer!

So, every January after that, I would pull out the notebook and start over. In 2022, I captioned my “Asia Summer 2022” title with “Third time’s a charm!”. But at the same time, I was deep into planning a series of comeback concerts for our foundation. Somehow I actually believed I would pull together four concerts in four cities within a year AND travel to Asia for three weeks, uninterrupted. Also somehow forgetting my epic meltdown at the Ritz Carlton in Puerto Rico in 2014 when Ry and I had to take time out of our anniversary trip for yet another conference call about the one concert we were working on at the time. Somehow forgetting that our concerts own me. Again, the denial is strong with this one.

But really the road from Texas to Asia started long before 2020. It actually began in 2016, in Jackson’s history class when Jackson peered over their friend’s shoulder to see what she was watching on her phone.

When Jackson asked Abby, her response was “You don’t want to know.” After a bit of coaxing, Abby finally relented with the warning “Once you watch this, there’s no going back.” Truer words were never spoken.

Abby was watching BTS’s War of Hormone music video. Yep, a k-pop video can be credited semi-directly with a massive three-week trip to Asia. At the time, the now ubiquitous BTS was known only to a small group of fans in the US and probably just Abby in Sunnyvale, Texas’ bustling metropolis of 5000 people.

Jackson watched War of Hormone about a million more times before really falling through the looking glass and eventually pulling me in with them.

As a mother, I was thrilled that Jackson was suddenly interested in the wide world outside their window, full of interesting and different people, cultures, music and food that wasn’t chicken nuggets so I leaned into it, hard. I bought a Korean cookbook, watched k-pop music videos and k-dramas with them, coaxed my cousin-in-law, who conveniently happens to be Korean, to show me around H-Mart and teach us where to eat Korean BBQ and bingsu. I even agreed to take a community college Korean class with Jackson. Which Jackson had to back out of – but I stayed – and then took two additional semesters.

It seems like a ridiculous beginning, but here we are. There are other motivations behind the trip and other reasons we chose Asia, but I’ll save those for another post. I should warn you though, there is strong precedent that I will abandon this blog just a few days into our trip. I promise to really try this time, but I am prone to wandering. It cannot be helped.

I’ll also toss out the disclaimer that I am writing this for multiple reasons and audiences so sometimes it may be a bit disjointed. My primary goal is to chronicle it for my own benefit and make it available to family and friends that want to tag along and see what we’re up to since the Facebook makes me nauseous. Secondarily is that people ask me frequently about my travel planning. Maybe others can benefit from my obsessive, sleepless nights. Now they have a place to see where we went, how much it cost, and what we thought about it when planning their own adventures. Lastly, when I stalk other people’s travels on the internet I often wish I could get a sense of how scary that road is, that ride is, that place is so I can figure out if it’s an option for a scaredy cat like me.

I’ll leave this post with a Fun Fact – the drawing featured with this post was brought back from Japan by my maternal grandmother. My grandparents and mother were stationed in Osaka in the late 40s until my grandfather was sent to fight in the Korean War in late June 1950. But that’s a story for another post.

Niki