Welcome to my Completely Rational Travel Anxiety Spiral
Or: How I Lost My Cool at Country #53
After living in fifteen cities across three continents and traveling to 52 countries, you'd think I'd be immune to travel anxiety. Yet here I am, in my Seattle home, deep in Wikivoyage articles about North African travel advisories and trying to convince myself that my tiny satellite phone purchase for desert emergencies is completely rational and not at all influenced by watching too much Star Wars.
It's ridiculous, really. I've lived everywhere from Arabian suburbs to Canadian islands, navigated Russian customs with a Korean passport and American credit cards, and even led first-time visitors through European capitals I'd just landed in myself. But somehow, the prospect of coordinating a three-week Mediterranean journey with my family has me questioning every travel instinct I've developed over the decades.
This time feels different. Not because of the destinations themselves—Tunisia, Malta, and San Marino will simply be countries #53-55 on my ever-expanding list. Not even because of the complex logistics of meeting my mom (flying from Seoul) and my uncle and aunt (already in Italy) in Rome before heading to North Africa together.
No, what's keeping me up is this strange new anxiety I can't quite shake. Maybe it's the recent headlines about plane incidents. My uncle's previous travel mishaps don't exactly help calm my nerves. This is the same person who once got detained at a Russian airport for weeks because he forgot to update his visa—though in his defense, he was probably too focused on getting the perfect shot of Saint Basil's Cathedral to worry about mundane things like international travel documents. Or the time he took us on a whirlwind walk through the back streets of Paris in search of the Louvre for 45 minutes, when in fact it was a 7-minute distance. I famously ran through the Louvre in 30 minutes and saw 3 masterpieces before leaving in tears to make my flight from Charles de Gaulle (let's not talk about how that flight got delayed three times then eventually canceled due to Air France strike, and I never made it to Morocco, until this day). His approach to travel planning can best be described as "optimistically improvisational," which works beautifully for his award-winning photography but less so for, say, remembering which ruins close early during Ramadan.
Could this be why this trip has my stomach in knots? On paper, it should be straightforward: ten days in Tunisia, followed by adventures through Malta and Sicily, wrapping up with a quick dash through Bologna and San Marino. I've got spreadsheets, backup plans, and enough downloaded offline maps to navigate us through a digital apocalypse.
My mom, on the other hand, seems blissfully unconcerned. "Malta? Oh, I haven't had time to read up on it at all. But I'm sure you've got everything under control, sweetie!" she chirps over the phone, as I frantically cross-reference travel advisories. Her faith in my planning abilities is touching but deeply misplaced. At least my years of Italian classes should help with most of the trip, though I suspect my Arabic will mostly consist of enthusiastically pointing at my phrasebook while repeating "shukran" with varying levels of desperation.
My Google search history this week is a masterpiece of escalating anxiety:
"Recent aviation incidents Mediterranean routes"
"Aircraft safety statistics 2024"
"Wind patterns FCO-TUN January"
"Tunisia desert emergency contacts"
"Do Jawas actually exist or did Star Wars lie to me"
"How to say 'please don't arrest my uncle, he only photographs ruins' in Arabic"
"Satellite phone reception Mediterranean region"
To an outside observer, I'm the unflappable travel veteran, confidently navigating us from bustling medinas to serene Sicilian hill towns. Internally, I'm doing mental math on backup battery packs for my backup satellite phone and rehearsing multilingual crisis management scenarios in my head.
In three days, this journey begins. Whether my carefully crafted plans for Valletta, Mdina, Catania, Siracusa, Ortigia, Noto, Ragusa, Modica, Bologna, Rimini, and San Marino survive first contact with reality remains to be seen. Until then, I'll be here, getting my will notarized and organizing emergency contact information for my dog—you know, totally normal pre-trip tasks. Though I draw the line at calculating satellite phone battery life in various climate conditions. Probably.
Finding home between what-ifs and wikis,
Susie