Breakaway Adventures: The Journey Home
Breakaway Adventures: The Journey Home
Every Adventure Has 3 Parts: The Idea, The Experience & The Journey Home
Photos / Indrek Kongats
Every adventure has three parts: Part One is the idea, the research, the planning, the anticipation and the departure; Part Two is the actual experience, physical immersion into the reality of the unknown; Part Three is by far the best, simplistic and rewarding - the journey home!
The next time you’re in your favorite coffee shop, look around you. Better yet, listen to the conversation and see if you hear more than just “how is your day going” or something about the weather. Sometimes you’ll hear someone say, “I was in the Arctic yesterday and I rolled in at 5:00am this morning.”
Hearing something like that has always made me wonder how many of us have secret identities. It’s as if almost everyone around you is a Clark Kent. They look just like you on the outside, they sit in a chair in a coffee shop just like you, but behind that normality hides a super human adventurer, someone who was thousands of miles away one minute and in a blink of an eye is seated at a table in your hometown café!
That seemingly instantaneous travel from points A to B has always intrigued me. One minute we are there, the next minute we are here in the café! Everything we’ve seen in a sci-fi show, like the original 60s Star Trek, eventually becomes reality, like the cell phone communicator or way back in time in the 30s cartoon strip Dick Tracy with his Facetime watch! All that’s left is for us to say, “Beam me up Scottie” when we want to travel. Thankfully we haven’t reached that stage yet as it would ruin the thrill, the excitement, and the anticipation in the journey home!
There is a point in every adventure when it's time to go home, you’re tired physically and mentally, and you just want to sleep in your own bed. Sometimes the sadness of leaving something behind can be powerful but when ‘push comes to shove’ going home is the stronger of the two emotions and most often prevails.
Going home is like a dry erase white board. One minute, the board is covered with writings, drawings or formulas, and in a swipe of the eraser it is blank again. The journey home isn’t always smooth, there can be many unexpected events that weren’t anticipated like flight cancelations, lost luggage or someone forgets to pick you up at the airport. Once you are finally home, all the inconveniences however major they seemed at the time are erased just like the scribblings on the white board. It’s almost as if they never happened!
My journey home last week was just like that! One minute it was I that was in the Arctic witnessing life in another culture, another time zone, far removed from fast food take out windows, to walking around with a loaded rifle to protect my group and myself from being fast food for bears.
24 hours ago, from the time I write this, our final day, I was sitting on a boat that was sitting on the rocks of a river bottom because we had missed the outgoing tide by mere minutes. As we waited for 8 hours for the new tide to roll in and float us out of our predicament, we had time to reflect on the situation and how we could have avoided this mishap. As our guide kept telling us, “There isn’t a problem, only a solution”.
Eight hours is a long time and it seem like an endless abyss. The only way to get through it was not to think of it in terms of minutes but rather opportunities! Without any kind of cell phone service, there was no way to call for help and notify anyone of our predicament. Help was not going to come anyway as there was no way for help to reach us, and quite frankly, we weren’t in any danger.
A river bottom isn’t something someone sees every day, I mean not just a dried-up drought type river bed but a living ecosystem that a tidal change exposes twice a day. At first, I started looking for some sort of treasure, an ancient artifact exposed after thousands of years buried beneath silt and sand. Not finding anything that exciting, I wished I had my very own Wilson to kick around just like Tom Hanks! As I returned to my seat in our marooned boat I resorted to reorganizing my 1,500 pictures on my cell phone. Eventually the tide came flowing in and lifted up the boat and our spirits.
Upon returning to camp around midnight, we were tired and hungry after what seemed like forever being stranded. After a hot cup of coffee and a slice of buttered toast, all was if it never even happened! To further erase our harrowing marooning, we focused on breaking camp and packing for our flight home.
Air travel never bothers me but there are some flights that you somehow wish you were never on. Our Canada North flight ran into remnants of Debby, a tropical storm, that ran up the east coast to greet us in Montreal on our approach to Trudeau International.
There was nothing but gray to see out of the windows of the Boeing 737, normally a very safe aircraft until recently with Boeing making all sorts of news headlines, not in the most favorable way, one felt less assured! Without the sense of sight, one relies on sound. We were scheduled to land at 18:40, and at 18:40 the pitch of the airplane changed just before we hit the first bump in the road and the engines revved up again! For the next 40 minutes it felt like riding a horse that didn’t want to be ridden. The plane bucked and jolted us side to side and up and down, all the while the engine hum slowing down before sudden screaming accelerations. When you hear complete strangers asking one another to hold hands and you see the stewardesses doing the same you start thinking about the worst-case scenarios. Finally, the words we all wanted to hear over the intercom, “We are now on our final approach.” Being a positive person, I took the word final in a positive way! Upon landing as hoped the cheering and clapping took over and we departed the plane!
It’s tough to recall everything that you just experienced on your journey once you arrive safely home and the recent past becomes so distant that its only a memory, but a good journey just the same! Now off to Part One of the next adventure!!!
—————————————
Indrek Kongats is an artist, traveler, outdoorsman, and business owner residing in Ellicottville. He operates River Dog Art Gallery in Houghton, NY, and his Breakaway Classic Adventures specializes in adventure travel destinations. Learn more about him at breakawayclassicadventures.com.