I love traveling, and if I could I would be doing it just right now, instantly. But, like a lot of you, admittedly, most of the time I spend the days surviving the daily, depressing 8 to 5 grind at the dullest job in the universe.

It’s doable, of course it is. When the going gets tough the tough just get going. Easy. But sometimes, especially on those endless days of gloomy graveyard skies or poisoned by too much bleak striplight routine, or at night when reading all those travel blogs of yet another guy or girl setting out for their life changing RTW and realizing your own planned trip (sunshine! oh Ra!) still feels like a bloody lifetime away, and god forbid, even the drinks won’t work anymore, on those days you might find me giving in for a brief moment, kick some furniture around, and then, when the ‘you poor sod’ soundtrack in my head goes a bit too loud, I grab a can of fresh Pringles and put “Joe” in the VCR*.

My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake and they live in a state of constant total amazement.

I’m always a bit surprised (or mildly shocked) when celebrating “Joe versus the Vulcano” as my nighttime travel bug stuck in a rut saviour, faces go empty like ‘I have a great gap in my cultural upbringing but I don’t want you to know it, so let’s talk some Avatar if you don’t mind’. And I want to go like, sorry, but, hey, it’s nothing short of a masterpiece! But then again I am not that much a shouter so I just go like this: You know, that first movie with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks… No, no, not Sleepless in Seattle or You’ve got Mail, before those… No, come on, you must know, it’s that movie about this guy, Joe Banks, who’s diagnosed with a brain cloud… No, that was a volleyball… So yeah, he has only six month to live, so he quits this awfull job – great opening scene by the way, could have been me… And then he plans to jump (“live like a king, die like a man”) into a live volcano on the island of Waponi Wu to appease the gods? They love orange soda and… Nothing? Never? Oh.

Anyway. It doesn’t matter. For all I know I could have been talking about Indiana Jones and get get a couple of nods of appreciation, but then I couldn’t have oh so subtly hinted at the brain cloud of my own and declare Pringles as the ultimate travel snack, even in front of a tv.

Sometimes you just need an imaginative and gloriously life-affirming movie to get you going. And never mind if you prefer ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ (great one too!) but in it are no palmtrees and boats and girls in hula dresses, so it happened to be Joe versus the Volcano. If you have seen it let me know. If not, please give it a try. You even may find yourself buying some great luggage in the end. I didn’t, but that’s another story.

*If you by any change have a dvd of Joe versus the Vulcano and hate it, please contact me. Like all good things they are hard to get.