First post

This is my first gap year blog post!

If you are reading this, I'm honored that you've taken time out of your day to join me on my journey.

Hopefully this blog will be an easy way for anyone interested in my upcoming year of travel to keep up with my adventures. It should be an unfiltered window into my experience doing something unlike anything I've ever experienced before. I love writing and my aim is for this to be not only informative but entertaining and intriguing.

Even though my approach to this blog will be very free-form and improvisational, I thought I should draw up a list of some types of entries I expect this blog to include:

  • Real-time literal updates on where I am geographically and on a smaller scale, from blurbs like "Just landed in Ecuador today! It's hot here but the people have been friendly so far :)" to longer entries going into detail about my surroundings and panting vivid pictures that will hopefully make it easy to imagine what it's like to be where I am.
  • More abstract reflections, musings, and observations that will give you some insight into the emotional and psychological aspect of my journey. I may even spend some time posting poetry or prose writing on this blog that has more of an artistic purpose than anything else.
  • Future plans and intentions: I hope to document everything from my long-term plans for the rest of the year down to what I feel like doing in the next day or two. As the trip unfolds my plans will change and I want to keep track of all of my aspirations, fallen through and come true.
  • Reviews and opinions on the places I've been to and advice for others interested in traveling, and all the life lessons I will have learned.
  • Rants! I fully plan to fill up the blog with paragraphs of feverish venting about whatever inconveniences and obstacles I'm bound to hit, hopefully in a way that I and you all can laugh about down the road.
  • Otherwise, words. I love words and I plan for this website to be a place where my brain is comfortable spewing out some literature in an act of honest sharing with the people I care about. Regardless of its purpose, this blog will be a tangible footprint of the turbulent, exciting, unpredictable journey my mind will take over the next 391 days and beyond.

For those wondering how often I will be posting, I wonder the same. I expect to make a post whenever it so happens, which may end up being every day or once a month.

My trip has already begun, despite the fact that my departure date (Sept 7) lies over a month away. My senior year of high school and this summer on Cape Cod have felt like a trip around the world, figuratively. My life and environment is changing so fast that I've already started embracing the nomadic lifestyle, and I'm sure we'll only be seeing more of that in the months to come.

Living out of my currently bedridden car, biking around main street, working 13 hour shifts in a day, staying up way too late making memories with my friends from school, and creating things that feel meaningful to me are only a few things I spend my precious last days of summer doing. Amid this, I hunch over my laptop and write when I find myself with an extra hour or two when I happen to be at home. It's rare, but moments like this will be what produce posts like this leading up to September 7.

In the next few days, I'll talk a little more about my experience at home this summer in preparation for gap year, as well as a detailed itinerary that you will be able to refer back to for some context. I plan both to keep new, separate updated itineraries as my plans change and to consistently work on a master itinerary that tracks these changes. By the end of my trip this will be a map of my travels that portrays where I went and when.

That's all I can be brought to write for now, expect to hear from me soon! Peaces ✌
-Jonah <3

Comments

  1. AnonymousSeptember 8, 2023 at 3:05 PM

    Love this and can't wait for a lot of updates!

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousNovember 11, 2023 at 12:52 PM

    Hi Jonah. So glad you got my email address corrected and just opened your blog. Love reading all that you have posted so far. You are a very interesting and talented writer. Thanks for sharing with me. Virgie

    ReplyDelete

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