Eliza S Robinson

Travel Diary — Day One — 26th June 2016

The first post in what will possibly be a two-week-long series of my ramblings. Handwritten throughout the day, and painstakingly typed up on my phone at night. (I can’t believe I’m travelling without my laptop for two whole weeks!)

26th June — afternoon

The philosopher, Anthony Flew, wrote in his case against miracles that we can know (biblical) miracles aren’t true by using our knowledge of the world as it currently is, and making an educated guess that the way the world works has not changed in the past two thousand years.

Travelling, for me, seemed like a miracle — going to a different part of the world, vacating my ordinary life for the next two weeks. I can’t remember the last time I went on an aeroplane. I was six years old, and it was a trip to Italy, but I have no clear recollection of the actual flight.

Trains, though? Trains are familiar. My past two train journeys were school trips — my former school’s annual trip to London for English and Media students. On at Penrith, off at Euston. Infrequent, but familiar. That is perhaps why my journey no longer exists in the realm of the miraculous.

It’s different, certainly, for I am alone. My self is an island amidst the sea of Others, but the path is familiar, and I am not scared.

Watching the English countryside fly past me, through the half-window of the train I have access to, I cant help wondering if my entire journey will feel this way — familiar, safe, an old, long-lost friend, rather than a distant stranger. I haven’t left Britain in years, and I’ve never been to Estonia. Yet Estonia is familiar to me, Tallinn is familiar to me. I have set three books (and counting!) there, I have read countless articles, seen countless pictures. I’ve been obsessed with this place since I was fourteen. This isn’t a miracle, it’s a dream coming to life. A dream I have put into action by my own will, and i am overjoyed.

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Evening:

Thought of the day: if you want to travel — truly travel — then prepare to get lost, both physically and metaphorically. Enjoy the journey of losing yourself and questioning yourself.

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I love hotel rooms — the little ones, where there’s barely space to move, and the carpet’s frayed at the edges. I feel comfortable in them — I could live a life in them, I suppose, roaming from city to city and town to town, hiding from Reality and Politics (both the political and the personal). I could write novels and move around. And I could hide; I could hide in myself, enveloped in that comfortable familiarity of my own being. Perhaps I love tiny, cheap hotel rooms for their anonymity. You stay for a night, and then you’re gone. You pass like wind through bare trees, a force of power, with no leaves to rustle — you leave no trace of your existence. It’s the solitude, the loneliness…there is such beauty there.

I’ll fall asleep to the lullabye of aeroplanes tonight, and tomorrow night I’ll fall asleep far, far away — across the continent, in a different country and a different city, where I don’t speak the language. I’ll have only the characters in my head for company, and it will be beautiful.