My trip to Mexico & how traveling feels different at 30

Sometimes I wonder if I used up all my traveling energy in my twenties.

This week I’m in Mexico, visiting my friend Meghan who’s been living here for several years. I came to Mexico City for her 30^th birthday party, a rather big bash.

Meghan, my freshman year college roommate turned best friend of the past decade, has sort of assimilated into the Nink family. She’s good friends with my sisters too, so they also came down for the party.

The party was really fun – seventy people, incredible quesadillas, tequila sodas, and dancing salsa late into the night on a rooftop deck – and then we spent a few days exploring Mexico City after, checking out Meghan’s neighborhood and favorite local spots.

After a few days of exploring, my sisters headed back to the US while Meghan and I flew to the beach in Oaxaca, Mexico, where we are now staying in a tiny town called Mazunte.

I didn’t do so well when our flight shook violently while climbing out of Mexico City yesterday. I’m okay with a little turbulence but this was major, starting from the moment we lifted off and lasting for what felt like hours but was probably five to ten minutes.

In the very back row of the plane, Meghan and I squeezed each other’s hands too tightly and kept our eyes squeezed shut while the plane shuddered and bounced up to cruising altitude, like a small boat being tossed about on large waves.

I nearly had a panic attack, but didn’t. (Yay, strategies! Therapy!)

“That’s worse than it usually is, I swear,” she told me when it smoothed out and we were able to laugh about it a little. From the tiny airport where we landed, we debated taking a private taxi, shared taxi, or bus to our Airbnb a few towns over in Mazunte.

We opted for private taxi in the end and she negotiated the price and route with our taxi driver. He covered an hour and a half’s drive along the coast in an hour, taking the twists and turns quickly like we were in a high speed chase. I tried to quell my queasiness by looking at the the bright blue water winking at us off to the right, always visible from the coastal highway.

Eventually we bumped down a dirt road and, at the very end of it, arrived at our Airbnb, a cute little place built into the side of a cliff. It’s very remote, very beautiful.

Now we’re in this gorgeous little beach town which is small and sleepy and feels more like a beach nook: the beach we walked down to from our house was called rinconcito, little corner.

So all’s well that ends well. But I found myself thinking on the flight, in the taxi, and even at various points in Mexico City: did I use up all my traveling energy in my 20s?

Are each of us allotted at birth a finite quantity of Energy for New and Adventurous Situations, and once you use it up, it’s gone?

And if so, should I have saved some of mine for use in later decades of life rather than blowing through it in my 20s?

I couldn’t fall asleep last night and it might have been since Raja was not by my side. And I thought: I’m at this gorgeous beach on the southern coast of Mexico, surrounded by rocky cliffs. Everything is blanketed in lush green. Why am I missing my one-bedroom apartment in the suburbs of Boston, MA?

I could tell many stories of former versions of me who seemed to have no trouble at all rocketing around on various planes, trains, buses, boats, taxis, and rickshaws.

The first story is called 20-year-old Georgie decides she wants to spend the summer working on organic farms in Ecuador with her sister. Together they travel to six or seven organic farms in the course of a summer, working for their room and board. Hauling logs in the cloud forest region of Mindo, shoveling cow manure on the western coast, tending a vegetable garden outside Quito, building a mud shed in Tumbaco.

Crisscrossing the country by bus, the two sisters have matching overstuffed packs and a matching look: tanned faces, ratty t-shirts, and irreversibly knotty hair pulled back in French braids. I don’t think I’ve ever been as fit as I was that summer.

The second story is called 20-year-old Georgie then decides she wants to continue learning Arabic by studying abroad in Amman, Jordan. After much back and forth with her university over transferring credits from a random language center they’ve never heard of,^[1] and much heated debate with her parents about safety, she flies to Amman and moves into a shabby, rundown student apartment near the Arabic language center where she’s signed up for courses.

She spends those first few months trying to navigate the city, feeling totally lost and hopeless at Arabic, struggling to get along with a difficult roommate, and battling a washing machine that gives her small electrical shocks when she reaches in to pull out her clothes.

The third story is called 22-year-old Georgie decides to take a humanitarian aid job back in Jordan after college. A rather comedic situation ensued, which you can read about here: Why I Moved Halfway Across The Globe At 22.

There were countless other stories. Earning peanuts at that first job in Amman, I didn’t have a ton of money, but I made enough to get by in Amman, travel home twice a year to see my family in the US, and travel a bit more besides.

What I lacked in money or stability, I made up for with an inexhaustible love of seeing new places, and I prided myself on being a low maintenance traveler and taking the cheapest (and therefore worst) flight to get myself there.

I knew, even then, that it was a huge privilege to be able to afford a plane ticket and take time off work, to get to see all these new places. An added bonus was that Jordan, my home base for around seven years, is so centrally located in the world. I could never have done all those trips starting from the US!

Also, I had seemingly endless energy for traveling.

I was lucky enough to go to Greece and Cyprus, the UK, Palestine, Lebanon, and Egypt in those years, plus all over Jordan. And Austria, Germany and Switzerland with Raja, and Italy with my family to celebrate my parents’ 25^th wedding anniversary!

All the while, much of my energy was being poured into my Zaatari Camp job and, when I look back, it’s a wonder I was able to show up to work every day and give it everything I had.

I now wonder how I didn’t get exhausted sooner from all of that.

A few months ago I turned 30.

I still have a sense of adventure and still love to visit new places. But also, I was more stressed than I expected to be by the insanely bumpy flight and taxi ride yesterday. I missed my home and routine and husband more than I thought I would on this trip.

I hate to even admit that.

I’d rather skip over that part and only focus on the good parts: that I had a really nice time seeing my friend, visiting the Teotihuacan pyramids, spending time with my sisters, pretending I know how to dance salsa, and eating street tacos. And that Mexico City is filled with trees and parks and has a laid back vibe. It’s a luscious, welcoming place, and I can see why Meghan has been living here for years.

Sometimes I wonder where 22-year-old Georgie has gone – but do I want her back? Or am I happy with how I feel now, at 30?

You know how some people have “the itch”? Perhaps they never _____ as much as they wanted to when they were younger, and now that they’re older they still want to ____, but they worry it might be too late?

Sometimes I think I no longer have the itch for international travel. I’ve written before that I could happily hunker down in a US suburb forever.

But other days I think perhaps this is all just a reaction to living overseas for several years and – by the end – being more than ready to come back home. And that, when I’ve been living back in the US for awhile longer, the itch will come back. That’s what my expat friends keep telling me.

As humans, is our Energy for New and Adventurous Situations infinite?

Regardless of the answer to that question, I am in fact here in Mazunte right now with my best friend, and last night we stepped off the beach directly onto a restaurant patio where I ate a delicious shrimp scampi and she had fresh fish. We drank beers (plain Corona for me; Victoria beer with lime and salt for her) and talked while darkness fell around us, and a stray cat came to beg for fish scraps.

I’m planning to enjoy my time here in Mazunte as much as I can, and with that, I am off in search of a good breakfast place along this little town’s main (which is to say, only) road.

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What’s one thing that’s changed in you between your 20-year-old self and current self? Are you at peace with it?

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[1] Ultimately unsuccessful. My university was like, “haha, no.” I went anyway – stubborn as I was to make my plan work – but because they wouldn’t transfer the credits, I had to take a leave of absence, technically, from school. I took a semester off and graduated college in seven semesters, which was only possible because I had AP credits.