Why Travel When It’s Cold
Or, the case for traveling without luxury. If I look cold in nearly every picture, it's because I was.
“I did it, I did it, I did it” was my mantra as I marveled my way through the John F. Kennedy International Airport in late February 2023. Extended, solo, spontaneous and budget-friendly travel might not sound intimidating to some of you, but the realities of weeks of it had been a personal victory for me.
Making it happen in the first place was rather a feat. It entailed picking a starting point—Rome, Italy—and packing for living and working abroad for a couple weeks. Or a couple months. Who really knew? I didn’t when I left. I also didn’t know where all I’d go, how I’d get between countries, what I’d eat, how safe I’d be, where I’d stay, and what I’d see.
I also didn’t know how cold I’d be for much of the trip.
Did you know it gets cold in Rome? That it snows in Florence and Greece? And that even without snow, it can be really cold in places like Malta and Portugal and sometimes Spain?
I didn’t really appreciate these possibilities until I was already committed to the venture. My operating premise had been that by staying in southern Europe, I should also be able to stay in warmer Europe. Or that 39℉ abroad should feel like a magical, European version of the 39℉ we’re familiar with here in the United States.
It doesn’t.
My expectation for southern Europe being or at least feeling warmer lasted for all of zero days. The lack of consistent heat and hot water in my well-reviewed but cramped, centuries-old Roman hotel was a real, er, treat, and I wondered what kind of deprivation experience camp I’d signed myself up for. It’s one thing to be cold while exploring, and another to not be able to warm up when you return to your hotel.
My hotel in Sliema, Malta, was positively modern compared to my Rome accommodation, and still the hot water was hit and miss during my weeklong stay. Florence, Italy—same deal. My various accommodations in Greece had wonderfully hot water, but the heat got turned way down during the day, and was non-existent in the lower levels of the apartment I booked for my second week in Athens. Portugal had bitingly cold days, too, and options for warming up were once again, unpredictable.
It probably goes without saying that my chosen mode of travel was not of the luxury variety. It was more of the character-building, adventure-having variety. I wouldn’t change a thing about it, except maybe taking a cuter multi-purpose scarf, and would recommend the same to anybody else. Why you ask? Or you don’t, but I still tell you:
When you travel when it’s cold, and you’re not traveling there in style or luxury, you get a taste of what the locals experience, not just what every other tourist experiences. Maybe this is why missionaries from my church come to love the countries and states where they serve missions—they experience the place in all the weathers, not just the gorgeous ones. Even as a traveler, when it’s bitingly cold and you’re trudging back to your hotel where you may or may not have hot water or the ability to turn the heat up as high as you want, you get a small taste of what it’s like to be miserable versus comfortable in this place.
On a truly frigid night, my Irish friend, Lisa, and I, had the ancient city of Mdina in Malta largely to ourselves. Earlier in the day, I’d been on a tour of the neighboring similarly ancient city of Rabat. In a truly astonishing act of generosity, I lent my gloves to a woman in our small group who had much less coat than I and was physically jerking in the cold.
This probably goes without saying, but you can get more of an accurate feel for a place when you are not surrounded by multitudes of tourists just looking for a good time or great Instagram pictures. With a jostling crowd, might you just as well be shuffling through a shopping mall in Des Moines, Iowa or a display at a museum? Don’t get me wrong, I saw just enough Instagram and other tourists to make things a modern-day sort of interesting. They became an attraction, standing out all the more without crowds to swallow them up. In the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, one very obviously Texan woman drawled loudly to her companions: “That’s a big baby Jesus!” She wasn’t wrong, and I still get a kick out of her very vocal assessment.
When you are wandering through somewhere like the ruins of ancient city of Mycenea and have minutes without another person in sight, you can start to wrap your head around the fact that actual people lived there. They did things in that place. We might not know exactly who lived there and what they did, but we are positive some kind of civilization existed there something like 3,500 years ago. And even just wondering about them—and how they were probably often cold and how on earth they stayed warm—connected me to this place and its people, and others like it, in a way I couldn’t be if I were there with hoards of others on a warm summer day. It also sparked my creativity in ways I will write about one day.
Another upside of traveling when it’s cold and you aren’t bent on traveling comfortably—you become grateful for everything.
The radiator in the Florence hotel bathroom, where I could warm my gloves or stand near them and remember what it is like to be warm.
The hostel in Athens which let me stash my suitcase so I could take only a backpack on my overnight island excursion.
Finding plentiful fresh food including real-live vegetables on every menu in Athens after carb- and Fanta-heavy weeks in Italy.
The kindness of the hotel staff who went to great lengths to honor my request for a quiet room, even if this meant putting me on the top and seemingly abandoned floor of the hotel, making me wonder if I’d survive the night.
A really warm coat and an albeit unattractive scarf which doubled countless times as a blanket.
The stranger on a tour in Lisbon who invited me to what turned out to be one of the most delicious and impactful dinners of my life.
A hot, 3€ gyro as I walked the few blocks from the Athens metro to my hotel, chilled from visiting Cape Sounion (Greece) in a sleet storm.
Enjoying the bell song from the cathedral right outside my window, only to realize halfway through that it was one of my favorite Christmas songs, “Angels We Have Heard on High.” Said song was even more of a gift since Christmas was two weeks past.
Hot chocolate, or really anything hot.
Friendly cats.
Friendly people.
The list could go on and on.
When you travel when it’s cold, largely without a plan, and without prioritizing comfort you get to really feel like a modern-day adventurer, not just a passive comfort-seeking excursioner there to be entertained and well-photographed. So much of my travel was stretching and hard and uncomfortable, and there was only so much I could do about the hardships if I was bent on having an experience.
And what an experience it was. I went to Europe to kick off something of an approaching-mid-life reset and woah, what a reset. Important to all of it was the fact that I wasn’t comfortable much of the time. You could say that my comfort zone was exploded over and over and over again.
The whole experience—much of which has continued in the States and another extended European venture—has led to profound expansions of my soul, creative interests, and possibilities. It has taught me to surrender control and lessened my need to know how “it” (the adventure of life) all works out. It has brought me a deeper appreciation of others, myself, and God for taking me to every one of these beautiful places.
It changed me.
And made me forever grateful for heat and the smallest comforts.
“Well-photographed,” now that’s a nice turn of phrase.