In five days, I shall embark on a cross-continental journey, driving from Tampa to Seattle, stopping everywhere and nowhere, feeding my wanderlust. Over the past year, I’ve visited Dallas, New York, New Orleans, Omaha, Tampa, Charlotte, Chicago, Baltimore, Washington and Seattle, as well as Mexico and Grand Cayman. In the past four years, I’ve lived in Reno and Vegas and rural Nevadan towns you’d never heard of; in Dallas and Tampa and a few places in between.

The sensation of traveling, of moving and experiencing entirely new parts of the world, is indescribable. It’s confusing and mesmerizing and intoxicating, thought-provoking and inspiring, tinged with the bittersweet taste of nostalgia and vuja de. I have no doubt that within the next decade or so, wanderlust will become listed in the DSM as yet another suspicious condition, another sacrifice on the altar of the Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex.

Throughout history, wanderers and adventures (or misadventurers, as fate would have it) spread ideas and innovations throughout the world, assisting civilization and feeding their own wanderlust. Here and now, in the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century, traveling is easier and cheaper than ever before. Strange foreign lands can be accessed with a swipe of a credit card and several hours in a flying metal vessel.

The full allure of it is hard to put in words. It’s a desire to explore, to see new places and to try new things, to not grow roots in boring little towns, to find something new. Something better. Something else. After all, even Frodo moved on and left his old digs for the Undying Lands when his grand adventure was over.

I spend my last days in Florida packing and reminiscing and enjoying the most of what this state has to offer. It saddens me to leave it all behind, but the exchange will be more than worth it, for there’s a new journey to be had, new city to explore, new land to wander.