Travels With Pain

When you’re not healthy, ultra-low-budget traveling is NOT a great idea. In fact, the best topical anesthetic I’ve ever found for travel-related chronic pain flares is…cash money. Nothing makes the pain back down quite like rubbing money on it.

Money might not be able to buy love or happiness or Real Meaningful Travel Experiences(tm), but it sure can buy a lot of creature comforts that diminish the grinding agony I can experience on an ill-conceived budget trip.

Here are a few pain-minimizing travel items that money CAN buy:

• First class and Business class airplane seats
• Taxi rides
• First class train compartments with comfy beds, pillows, and in-room food service
• Motel/hotel/inn rooms with comfortable beds, private bathrooms, soundproofing, heating and air conditioning
• Room service
• Rental cars
• Massages
• Spa treatments and hot tub & sauna time
• Good, healthy food
• A driver

Does this mean that you need to be rich to travel with pain? No.*

Does it mean you probably should save up for a while before trying to take a trip? Yes.

* I’m not rich. In fact, up until about a year ago, I was darn close to broke. Which is a big part of why this blog went dark for almost a year–I did not have enough money to travel, which meant I had to go get myself a full-time day job and start saving up money if I wanted to travel again. For the last year, I’ve been focusing on the day job. My savings are starting to build back up, and I’m starting to plan trips to places like Ireland and the Yucatan and Egypt. But I’m not a teenager who can buy a secondhand backpack and a one-way coach plane ticket anymore. I need the creature comforts money can buy or I will be a miserable pain-wracked mess from about day 0.5 of my journey. Which makes the whole exercise pointless. So–I need thousands of dollars to travel internationally.

In the meantime, I limit my travels to nearer-by places that are cheaper to visit. I’ll do a post about how I create trips that accommodate both my pain and a limited budget.