Travel information

Hello friends,

I am telling you about travel!

Reader Diane H wanted to know about travel.

Okay I described Boat Travel in 2023 so hopefully you weren’t totally lost and confused and crying your little eyes out. I don’t write this email, or any email, to make people cry. The situation of travel is basically, you exist right? And you are doing that somewhere in space, almost certainly on Earth where I live, if you are a bunch of gas reading this in a billion years I can’t plan for what your frame of reference is sorry. I would love to include you, but this is going to be totally human centric. So again you are existing, that’s awesome, and you are doing it somewhere! But maybe you want to go a different place? Maybe it is a thing as simple as where you are is the bed and where you want to go is the kitchen to make your breakfast hot dogs. Maybe it is more complex and you want to go from your bed to a couch and the couch is in China. Or maybe you are on Earth planet and you want to go to Moon planet, even though there is essentially nothing to do there except possibly clean up some litter. It all involves travel! Here are the Normal Types of travel that you might use on these wonderful journeys:

FOOT

Everybody from Xena to Gina (your mom’s friend, the one who sued Red Robin) knows about traveling by foot. With this one you just kind of be moving your legs around on the ground and going places. If you do it very fast it is called Running and if you do it regular it is called Walking. There is an in-between state called jogging? That one is only really for exercise, you would run somewhere to get there quickly and walk there otherwise, there’s few situations that specifically require a jog? And whats with the food they serve on airplanes, is it difficult to cook food in the sky where God lives? Can’t you ask him for help? Sorry tangent anyways traveling by foot is really good for distances like bed to toilet but pretty bad for distances like Indianapolis to Brazil. Even if you surfed a bit of the way it’s just not going to work that great. This form of travel can be highly pleasurable when it’s nice weather outside, or I guess when it’s bad weather outside if you’re one of those freaks who loves to almost die in nature.

BEING CARRIED

This might be by another person or by an animule, I guess they might develop a robot that carries you around some day but most likely it’s going to be piloted by someone wearing a motion capture suit in the global south and the guys currently in power whose whole thing is being toddlers with guns who hate their moms but also want to be cradled so bad they can taste it will make having these into a weird status symbol where they try to act like they’re being swaddled in tactical blankies in a very masculine way. Sorry that got out of hand pretty fast anyways when you are small or just know a really strong person you can get carried around a lot which is super fun or if you are friends with a horse or have cruelly dominated it you can ride around on their backs too. There’s other animals like bulls and whales who you can sort of ride around on but horses are the only one I’d say we’ve got it completely figured out. Anybody whose selling you a saddle for a giant squid is counting on you being too dead to ask for a refund.

SMALL WHEELS

You can travel using our circular friend the wheel! It is possible to do it with just one wheel if you use a unicycle but unless you have a medical situation too specific for me to possibly imagine everyone is going to think you are an asshole if you do this, sorry if you got excited. The next configuration of wheels up from that is two wheels which would usually be either a bicycle or a wheelchair. If you are traveling with wheelchair it’s all the same rules as walking around except there are legally supposed to be ramps and stuff to help you get around but sometimes people who are in charge of making buildings hate to do this because it costs more money than not doing that, which they feel strongly is quite reasonable and sympathetic. If you are on bicycle I don’t know what the rules are for you and it’s impossible to learn from context because a lot of bicycle people – NOT YOU I’M SURE – adopt a kind of attitude like because they are on a bike there’s sort of no rules unless someone is doing a rules violation to them? They will be like wow cars are getting too close to the bicycle lane on the road that’s dangerous then be like zooming around on the sidewalk where people are just having Strolls like HEY! THIS IS THE ROAD NOW BECAUSE OF A CHOICE I MADE MOVE IT OR LOSE IT PAL! I literally don’t know if that’s allowed or what they’re supposed to be doing, I don’t know how to ride a bicycle but I have recently made the decision to learn how to ride an adult tricycle. My reasoning for doing this is that it’s probably quite good exercise/safer in terms of exposure to dudes saying “I have some kind of weird cold!” and then licking their hands a bunch and asking who wants to have a thumb war on the train/they got huge baskets in the back which is convenient/it will make people who take riding a bicycle very seriously upset. “Why not just ride a bicycle?” Well friends I am physically oafish and at the age of 35 I am basically not interested in learning to ride something I am going to fall off of a million times. “you just have to learn to balance it” I am not interested in interacting with anything with a seat in a way where I am in charge of making it not fall down. “people will think this looks uncool” I think the guy riding a bike really slowly, obviously petrified of falling over but also still constantly falling over would register as even less cool, also looking cool or graceful doing something physical was never particularly in the cards for me to begin with. You might be wondering about scooters and skateboards but those is toys and not for travel. “I travel places with a skateboard!” If that is true people in your life learned to stop counting on you a long time ago. They might be happy to see you but even a dog wouldn’t make you their emergency contact. You can use these wheels to go generally around the town? Some people travel incredibly long distances by bicycle but they are always doing it in a way that’s meant to be impressive, if you were going from Quebec to San Francisco you wouldn’t see the cost of train tickets and go hm perhaps a bike.

BIG WHEELS

This is typically cars! The big vroom vroom machines that is a little room with four wheels under it and you go zip zip all over the place at speeds not even greyhound dog can run. As we know cars digivolve into trucks, which can then either armor digivolve into semi-trucks or digivolve with the Crest of Storage into vans and then warp digivolve into busses. These are really useful for travel which is why there’s like a billion of them which sometimes sucks super bad because everyone in a car is secretly nursing the hope that they are actually the only person in the world with a car or who is going a place and the de-personalizing aspect of a car allows people to act very strangely in ways they wouldn’t if you were all just walking quickly together. “How do we save our one and only human race from this evil, Ryland?” Don’t worry I effortlessly can solve this with a situation called every car will be made to look like the face of whoever is driving it in both the back and the front, and using animatronics and computer scanning it will exactly mirror your facial expressions so you and everyone else are forced to view each other as human beings capable of fear and love just trying to get by. I guess the other kind of wheels is tanks, which is a kind of war car with a giant gun on it that for some reason the police have now. Theoretically so long as there are roads connecting your destinations you can go anywhere in one of these big wheel machines, they are very popular for going cross-country or I suppose even cross continent if you got enough safe roads and gas stations on whatever continent you live on.

TRAIN

Okay this is SORT of like a big wheels situation but it’s just so much more specific? Trains are a special long vehicle that travels on a track which is like a big length of metal you put either on the ground or suspended above the earth on very strong metal platforms, the train can only travel on these tracks. Trains are typically composed of multiple train cars all connected up to each other, I don’t know if it is possible to do just one super long train car but it seems like it would make turns complicated. Trains are wonderfully convenient for travel because you just get on one and sit down and it goes somewhere and you get off and whatever your stop is. The convenience of train travel has been massively suppressed in America where I live because of various wealthy dementoids, we could have tons of high-speed rail connecting our nation like other countries but we were told that is for wusses and went along with that because I suppose you can’t feel like a Tough Warrior sitting on a train with lots of other people. It’s probably important if we are going to have society that we stop designing our infrastructure around whether or not it makes weird guys feel like they are cowboys.

BOAT

Covered this one!

SKY

You can travel in the sky now! Isn’t that amazing? They make vehicles called airplanes and helicopters. Helicopters are kind of like sky-bikes, you can take them around the town but nobody would advise you to take a helicopter cross country. They fly by having a big thing spin around on top of them which is terribly exciting to people. Airplanes come in sizes from Sky Car to Sky Train, sometimes they are used to make explosions which is rude but they are mostly used for travel which is nice enough. It’s nice to go to Poland or whatever and say hi and exchange dumpling recipes. Sky travel is a big deal and very popular, it’s quite expensive compared to busses usually but it’s much quicker which is the big draw, probably one of the reasons we’re not allowed to have high speed rail now I think of it, way less people would fly from Pittsburgh to Dallas if there was a train that just totally blasted your ass there in an hour. If you are traveling internationally from America in a serious way airplanes is the absolute best way to go about it until we invent the Everywhere Door (copyright of ryland please dont think you can steal from me or i will kill myself in front of your family)

SPACE

We can travel in space now too, which is amazing because it’s so difficult, it’s super hard to do and you have to be so smart to even try and do it a little bit. This has recently been co-opted by the Dracula class of rich people as like a way of insisting they have a normal penis because we’re not really investing in space travel at all in a public way and those doinks are the only ones with the cash to really do anything there and even their stuff is kind of babyish next to NASA. You don’t need to think about space travel too much because until we invent faster than light propulsion technology, which might never happen, there isn’t really anywhere to go and even if there is it still might take like a thousand years to get there? I think space travel is a good thing to do and something we should do because if we can invent really safe spaceships and make planets like Mars nice to be on that could all be quite beautiful but its not going to happen in the way the people currently trying to go to Mars are trying to do it, that’s just going to be a ship full of people who all murdered each other or died from a really glaringly preventable mechanical failure landing on a mostly dead planet. Maybe that much organic material landing there could eventually make some worms start growing in ten billion years? But most likely you won’t be traveling in space or needing to make a plan for what you’ll do in space. If benevolent aliens ever help us out with spaceships that might change but don’t plan on it! Just enjoy the pictures our robots send us from Mars for now, that’s really enough.

Thank you for reading my big space email! If you would like to find out about something, tell me and I will try to already know about it.

Love,

Ryland Duncan