I just spent the night in Mexico City, before my flight to Puerto Vallarta. I’m currently munching on nachos¹ in the airport lounge. I generally prefer to travel this way — arrive one day and depart the next, which makes things far less stressful, since I don’t need to worry about flights being delayed and missing my connection.

The downside is I spend two days traveling rather than just one. I can alleviate that somewhat by staying in hotels connected to the airport, since it avoids the time and stress of catching a train or a cab when I arrive and when I leave, but those tend to be expensive² and, maybe worse, means I’m pretty much cut off from the cities I’m visiting. That’s not great.

So what does it mean to visit a place? A lot of Americans track the number of states they’ve visited, which always raises the question how do you count? There’s the “boots down” rule where as long as you were standing on the ground, it counts.³ Some people only count places where they left the airport, or had a meal, or spent the night.

But even here you run into complications. I’ve known lawyers who flew into a city and spent a week cloistered in a hotel, writing contracts and eating room service. Did they visit? Then there’s the more stringent requirements: you have to have lived there. For a week? A year? A decade?⁴

Or is it about what you do, there? Have you visited New York if you haven’t seen the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty? Or are those for the punters, the people who fly in for the weekend to see a Broadway show and think they know New York? Do you really know New York if you’ve never eaten at Grimaldi’s? Do you really know New York if you’ve only eaten there?

When people find out how I’m currently living my life, they almost always want to know where I’ve been. And I can rattle off an impressive list.⁵ But some of those were barely a weekend. Some were barely a week. Some were for larps, or conventions, where I could have been anywhere, really. How many places have I really seen?

I don’t have answers, here. Everyone has to find the answers for themselves. No time is ever going to be enough; there’s always more to do, more to see, more to understand. Every time I leave someplace, whether I loved it or hated it, I always wish I had done more.

And maybe that’s the answer, for me. It’s not about visiting places at all. It’s about living where you are, no matter where you are, no matter how long you’re going to be there. That’s true whether you’re traveling or not. And once you stop doing that, it’s probably time to start looking for a new destination.

Next: Puerto Vallarta (PVR) to Mexico City (MEX)
Prev: Zitácuaro to Mexico City

Footnotes

¹ This lounge has nachos! And popcorn! And … basically nothing else vegetarian. But being able to grab my own cans of Diet Coke is worth a lot in my book.

² As usual, everything is relative. Sometimes it’s worth an extra $30/night to have access to a swimming pool and multiple pillows and a mattress which you can sink into — the last few places I’ve stayed have been closer to plywood.

³ I ran an errand to Burlington, Vermont one afternoon when I was working in New Hampshire on Howard Dean’s presidential campaign. It counts!

⁴ The conventionally accepted rule for becoming a native New Yorker is 10 years, not necessarily continuously, although if you’ve got the chutzpah to claim it sooner, I think that counts.

⁵ Currently 18 countries, 30 cities, depending on how you count