Some years ago — quite a lot of them — I cashed out, quit a great career that didn’t feel so great and left Canada on a one-way ticket to the South Pacific.
Seemed like a good idea at the time. It was not a good idea — it was a great idea.
I came back eleven years later. Then, at the urging of friends, family and a Random House Canada editor I was dating at the time, wrote the whole thing down in *Eleven Year Vacation*, a memoir about what happens when someone with more enthusiasm than judgment decides that the conventional life cannot be abided.
Writing it took a year. A year I took off working and spent loads of my hard-earned savings to finance.
The story involved sailing, cycling, hitchhiking, motorbiking, walking plus a fair few trains, cargo ships and trishaws across lands, islands and oceans, living in places that looked possibly fun on a map, several brushes with tropical wildlife and disease, a solid year of poverty on a faraway isle, occasional bursts of employment for which I was not remotely qualified, many magnificent people, many more fabulously questionable decisions and the gradual discovery that absolute freedom takes a toll.
After trying and failing to find a publisher in 2000, the book remained in hibernation. But it has been coming to life on Substack for three years, while I’ve gone over the draft written 25 years ago and re-edited it, a chapter at a time, and posted it, with any available photos I could find.
Eleven Year Vacation, approximately 80 seconds at a time
I’ve started recording short excerpts from the book and putting them on YouTube. Not the whole thing, as nobody deserves to be forced to watch me read a book into a camera for eleven years. Instead, I’m picking moments that give some sense of the excitement, stupidity, discomfort, exceptional characters, gloriously bad judgment and occasional flashes of luck and competence.
The first video begins with the decision itself.
The second has me on Day One in Western Samoa, when it occurred to me that my enthusiasm for exotic tropical places was about to be tested by the things living in them that I could expect to engage: Guinea worms, malaria, giant flying insects in your underwear, foxes with wings, fire coral, sea snakes, stinging trees, sharks, foot worms, face-flies, jungle cats, feral backpacker girls.
Adventure absent the classic injection of heroism.
My YouTube channel, which will hold all those made and yet to come: https://www.youtube.com/@paulfennwriter/shorts
Why hash this out, again?
Partly because I, and many of my ardent readers, find it funny. They need not trouble themselves to do what I did to experience and feel what I did. As well, the book covers the last eleven years before the internet seeped into our minds and our travel destinations and ruined both forever.
And also because, after years of writing other people’s stories, speeches, advertising, websites and whatever else I got paid to put into words, I’ve become increasingly interested in the minutiae of this strange business of preserving a life.
Memory is unreliable. In my case, it seems only the embarrassing parts improve with age. Which is why I think people like this project. There’s no boasting, no “I discovered the meaning of life,” no White Man’s Burden, guilt or anger, no interminable sunset descriptions. I bounce from one disaster to the next, seeing how much I can endure, trying to gain wisdom, but not usually succeeding. Driven by curiosity and a hunger for constant
change and a bank balance that lasted the first five years.
What comes after that is where, in many respects, the story really begins.
That’s what lights my fire these days in the context of biography and memoir writing: Not recording everything that happened, but finding the story hiding among the memories, letters and photos, like Michelangelo found David in a 10-ton block of marble — except you don’t have to line up for hours and pay money to behold it.
*Eleven Year Vacation* happens to be all mine.
If you’d like to read it, the first half of the travel memoir is free on Substack; the second is being edited, a chapter at a time.
**Read *Eleven Year Vacation* →**
https://paulfenn.substack.com/p/eleven-year-vacation
And if reading ain’t your thing, I’ve got you. I’ll continue reducing eleven years of my life to bite-sized evidence on YouTube.
I’m even mulling it as an audiobook or podcast.
I do hope you like whatever taste of it you choose to sample.