Marek Garcia
20th Annual Solas Awards Gold Winner in the Travel Memoir category
I can’t shake the feeling I’m forgetting something. I pack, unpack, repack – but something’s still missing. How do I fit everything I need into a backpack for a whole year? How do I pack if I don’t know where I will be in three months? Or in three days.
I spend my last two weeks getting ready for The Trip. Trying to fit everything I’ll need into a 40-liter backpack.
I repack because I have way too many shirts according to r/solotravel on Reddit. I unpack one more time and then repack again using packing cubes. I ask myself what I’ll actually need.
I try to see as many friends as I can in the last two weeks. As if I’ll be gone forever. As if I’ll be a different person when I come back.
It’s the first week of January and my flight out is in a few days. No return ticket, no concrete plan.
My parents host friends for Día de Reyes. Out in the backyard, after some small talk, I find myself in a longer conversation with Miguel, a family friend I’ve known for most of my life.
“Are you living here?” he asks.
“No, I just moved out of New York. I’m only here for another week.”
“So, you moved back?”
“Not really. I was just here for a couple months.”
Then comes the follow-up I’ve heard a dozen times in the last week: “So now what?”
The Trip. One year – nothing booked – a tour around the world.
I’ve had this conversation before. I know what’s coming. I should start a YouTube channel. I should look this place up. I need to avoid that country and region. This is how a friend of a friend stays at hotels for free. While well-intentioned, most of these ad-type recommendations are given by people who haven’t travelled long-term or been to the countries they are telling me not to go to.
But Miguel doesn’t say any of this. Instead, he asks more questions. Where am I going? How long? What made me choose to go there and not there?
Miguel’s a Harvard grad. Two kids. Twenty years in Weston. Built his own company and retired on his own terms. Country club, church. In a way, he followed the script. He’s smiling as I tell him my plan.
A part of me wishes I were talking to someone who has been at the same job at a bank for twenty years with the same haircut since graduating from college. They would ask me questions like: What about your career? When will you get married though? Won’t it be dangerous?
I hope for this because I have prepared answers for each of these questions. That type of conversation would be easy. But that’s not the case. Miguel isn’t stuck in the matrix. He used the script to his advantage – sold his company on his own timeline, carved out freedom, and now spends his time volunteering. He’s been to Botswana and lights up when he recommends a hotel there.
He doesn’t say it, but I can almost hear him thinking: Hell yes. Don’t look back. Then out loud, he talks about the importance of giving instead of just taking everywhere I go. That’s advice I gladly take. Finally, he has one last question. Why? Why am I traveling? Why for such a long time? Why alone?
These are the questions I still don’t have a neat TED Talk type answer for.
I have always wanted to see the world, but I don’t know why. Every profile on Hinge says they want to see the world. But why do I want to? I know traveling is my thing, but what does that overused cliché mean?
I should know; it has been on my bucket list for my whole life: an extended global trip. Yet, two weeks away from it, I am wrapping up work, seeing friends, and wondering what I am forgetting when packing. But I don’t actually plan for anything. I haven’t booked a single thing; I don’t know where I’ll be sleeping in less than ten days.
And most importantly, I still don’t know why I am going.
But do I need to know? Or is not knowing the answer to a question okay as long as the question is interesting enough and worth pursuing? Interesting enough to dedicate a whole year to.
What I do know is traveling forces me to be in the moment. I know travel brings out the best in me. And I know, when I was a kid, and would enter markets in Mexico and get lost, I felt equally scared as I felt free. Because the possibilities were endless – there was a whole world to see and discover and smell and touch for the first time in these markets. A hidden world available to me only, in plain but unexplored sight.
And that feeling isn’t available to me behind a laptop screen. I haven’t felt it in years. It disappeared sometime after college, buried under the script: five days of work, maybe one happy hour, saving a slice of my paycheck for some fantasy that never happens.
One of the reasons I’m going on The Trip is to find that feeling again. That’s what I want to tell Miguel. Instead, I pause and search for something that fits into a bite-sized, Día de Reyes–appropriate answer.
–
Three years prior, in December 2022, I was on a flight home from a weekend vacation. I had finally quit management consulting and signed a new job offer. I was in a three-week break before starting my new role. The first break I’ve had since graduating college.
During the flight, I started a new book: Shoe Dog – Phil Knight’s memoir starting from college to when and how he founded Nike. Early in the memoir, Knight talks about how he had been a college athlete, once driven and full of purpose, only to find himself dissatisfied with corporate life.
His daily consolation was lunch, and his monthly consolation was a paycheck. He wondered if the best days of his life were behind him. He noted how running, what he had done his whole life, was his one escape. Where he still felt alive.
I was 26 at the time, and while I was reading someone else’s story, it felt like the 50-year-old me was sending me a warning through the first pages of this book. Shit. Is the best part of my life already behind me? Is this it – five days a week on loan to the machine, then two days handed back at the end of the week? Over and over again?
I had been having these thoughts since graduating college two years ago, but I had parked them in the back of my mind. The reality was I was stuck in life. In corporate. The rat race. The script. And as I read the book, I thought of all the times I had moved around shapes in PowerPoint late at night.
It was during these late nights where I would open Google Flights on a separate screen and look at destinations. I would click on a city and then plan a trip in my head. Trekking in Nepal. Climbing a sand dune in Namibia. Seeing pumas in Patagonia. Anywhere but here. The farther the better.
My heart would race as I pictured myself in those places. But I would write the place down in my notes on my phone and then close the tab. I had to get back to work or risk another night of bad sleep. But now, on the plane, I paused.
Was life going to be forty years of this? Or was it time to start crossing things off the list?
Knight eventually decided to take a trip around the world. The main event for his trip would be one big stop: Japan. In Tokyo, he would pitch an idea to a shoe factory. An idea that he had had since college: take Japanese running shoes and sell them to the American market. He called the vision his Crazy Idea.
I didn’t have a shoe business to pitch but the thoughts that had been parked in my mind rushed to the surface as I read on. I thought about all the Managers in consulting telling me this was their last year before they quit. The Partners who promised they were out soon. I pictured myself ten or twenty years older, still staring at a computer screen at midnight on a Thursday, still researching these faraway places without booking anything.
Throughout the part of the book when he is backpacking, Knight foreshadows how different parts of his trip influenced what would soon be his new shoe brand. Finally, he talks about his stop in Greece. How the Parthenon was on his left when he stood in Athens. And on his right, another temple – this one a temple of a Goddess: The Bringer of Victory.
The name of the Goddess was Nike.
I wanted this. I needed this. A trip. Around the world, for one year.
But how? I had no money. What does a trip like this even cost? I had just signed an offer for a new job. I had just bought a new car. I had just told a girl from Bumble I would go on a date with her the following week. I was trapped. I was living the life that was promised to me in undergrad. I wasn’t sad or angry, but I was stuck living a life that wasn’t mine. A script I hadn’t written.
I kept reading.
How can I leave my mark on the world, I thought, unless I get out there first and see it? Before running a big race, you always want to walk the track. A backpacking trip around the globe might be just the thing, I reasoned…
I closed the book and looked around the plane. Tears gathered around my eyes. I would read a page then stare out the window thinking about what Phil Knight was saying. I wish I could do this, I thought to myself.
I could do this. But when?
The problem with sticking to the script isn’t that it’s scary to break character. It’s just easier to play by the book. To unconsciously follow the path. But to break free? I would have to be the director and the actor.
A long trip was exactly what I needed – a hard reset to snap me out of autopilot. Maybe I’d come home with a business plan like Knight. Or a girlfriend I met at a hostel. Or a new way of seeing the world. Maybe I’d just eat everything, meet everyone, and figure out what I actually wanted from my life. A quest to see the world might help me understand my place in it. And maybe, finally, understand myself.
Or maybe I could toss all those clichés aside and just go without a plan. See what was out there without trying to fit myself in it.
Yes, I would do that. But when?
The perfect time could be when I retire. No, I should travel when I’m young. But I don’t have the money. I should wait till I’m established professionally or until I have a bunch of money saved or when I find someone to come with me. Or, or, or.
A part of me knew if I kept waiting, there was a high chance I’d be waiting forever. I did the math. Okay, a trip around the world for a year would cost X. If I prioritize this, I can save Y per month. Which meant around two years of saving.
I can do that. It was possible – breaking free was within arm’s reach. Which was both exciting and terrifying because now I didn’t have an excuse. There was a plan in motion.
As the plane descended, I flipped to the end of the book and wrote down a promise to myself: I would, no matter what, take a trip around the world no later than January 2025.
That night, I opened a new savings account.
I called it My Crazy Idea Fund.
~ ~ ~
Marek Garcia is a writer, ex–poker player, and backpacker from South Florida. After walking away from corporate life, he set out on a year-long journey across four continents. A dual citizen of the United States and Mexico, Marek is an espresso lover and a lifelong Pumas UNAM fan, a soccer team from Mexico City, often chasing the team wherever they play. His essays dig into solitude, chance encounters, and the tension between freedom and comfort. Marek is the author of The One Knight Stand: College Student by Day, Poker Professional by Night, a novel about ambition, addiction, and the price paid for chasing one’s dream through the eyes of a young poker player. He’s currently at work on a larger travel memoir pulled from his time on the road.