Note: When I started writing this, I really didn’t have a topic in mind. It became really just an overview of my travel life and life in general. This is one of the great things I love about blogging.
When I started the fairly unprecedented travel binge I began at the end of April, I was planning on being done by July 1st and having most of July to sit at home and enjoy not traveling for bit. Work had other plans, and I was in our new Miami office for the last week.
While I have certainly traveled pre-pandemic, I had a few vacations here and there and my first international trip in 2018 to Istanbul, Athens, and Prague. I was on the conference circuit with my first job, but that was only a couple times a year. Because I lived in Indianapolis, which meant not a lot of direct flights, road trips to far flung places as New York and New Orleans were pretty much the thing. Honestly, I felt anything east of the Mississippi was “drivable.”
There were really two main reasons I didn’t travel that much. The first was that I really couldn’t afford it. When I was unceremoniously let go from the State of Indiana in 2004/2005 (political change over work issues), I took a pay cut. I did what I could to reduce my living expenses, but I just didn’t really have the mad money needed to travel. During that time, I also became a part of Indy Pride, which quickly became my volunteer full time job. While the joke of well traveled rich gays is certainly based in a lot of fact, I was not one of those that had the deposable income to catch flights, not feelings.
For the most part, I enjoyed the work with Indy Pride, but it was very exhausting. I was also at odds with my personality, which is naturally an introvert, who can very much be extroverted under the right conditions and definitely with a cocktail. While I will probably never know why I felt I needed to do this, the stress of being “on” all the time in social circles made me try to escape as often as possible. This led to a lot of road trips to nearby cities, Chicago, Cincinnati, Columbus, and even Dayton. I needed to find places where I wasn’t “Nick Murphy, Pride President” and just Nick. I realize a lot of this was a me thing, but it is what it is.
When I began with my current company almost 15 years ago, it was not much of a pay increase, but moving from the not-for-profit to the for-profit realm certainly led to more opportunities that I ever could have hoped for in government and not-for-profit realms. While most of my work was desk and office bound, when I started to transition into my current position in 2016, the travel opportunities became a bit more plentiful for work and leisure.
In 2018, I started to work from home, and that fed into my introverted nature, and since I had finally “retired” from Pride in 2015 (technically, 2014, but things began to implode and I stepped back in for a bit…a story for another day), I started to get into a pretty standard routine that to a certain extent still exists to this day: Monday-Friday AM gym, work all day, couch, sleep, and repeat. Then on the weekends I would rage out at bars, unless I was traveling to other cities. The thing about having run a community organization is that as things turn “bad” or not the way the community prefers, they want to talk about it with you. It became pretty exhausting. While it is somewhat gratifying that people reminisce about how you ran things, I couldn’t really revel in the failings.
Also in 2018, I finally put together my first international trip. When I first started planning, I looked at flying into Vienna, and taking a train group travel excursion to Budapest, Prague, and Berlin. Sound familiar to those of you that have read all of my musings thus far? However, from my various trips to Chicago, I had met a friend, Jerrad, who traveled a lot for work, and in 2018, he was basically living in Istanbul. I changed my plans and flew to a city that was never really on my radar. I’ll save that story for another day, too, but at the ripe old age of 44, the travel bug had officially bitten.
Around 2019, I was offered the first opportunity to travel and work a booth at a conference. I leapt at the chance to do it. My role is one of the few public facing business lines (look at me…talking like a consultant), and it made sense that I be the face at some of these conferences. After I landed back in Chicago from Istanbul, I decided it was time for a major change, and I began to put things in motion to move to Chicago. Since I worked from home, it made the move fairly easy, but of course, the family was not thrilled and work was probably not all that enthused either. However, since they had several people working in locations that didn’t have an office, they couldn’t really say no.
In November of 2019, after coming back from a conference in Ohio, I turned in my keys, said goodbye to the folks, and drove to Chicago to start my new life, I had a couple conference trips in the early part of 2020. While I was still flying Southwest at the time, the ease of travel out of Chicago vs. Indianapolis quickly became one of the best parts about the move. Then COVID hit.
As the rest of the world, my tip toeing into work travel ended for nearly two years. There were a few trips in 2022, a few more in 2023, but by 2024 up until now, travel has become a major part of my existence. I even took over coordinating all of our conference travel. I’m supposed to be sharing the load with people, but it quickly became apparent that I was good at this stuff, which means they pretty much leave me to my own devises to plan out which conferences we need to make an appearance at. While the last two to three months have been absolutely too much, seeing me go from Chicago to Europe, to Santa Barbara on the west coast, to Cape Cod on the east coast, and down to Orlando and Miami, it was all pretty much an itinerary of my choosing.
I’m a 51 year old man now, and while I have certainly learned a lot about travel, especially in the last three to four years, it can still take a lot out of me physically and emotionally. While I am in flight right now back to Chicago, I am 100% ready to just be a Chicago resident for the rest of July. Then, hopefully, I will be ready to go for August through November before the holidays. Then we start all over again in 2027.
