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Explain what happened first time I went to Salt Lake. How I just felt so peaceful there. Like when you visit the house you grew up in and all the fond memories come rushing back in.

Explain what happened when I went to Devil’s Tower. How I just closed Google maps because something told me I didn’t need it, and how somehow, I could just feel where it was. Then when I saw it on the horizon, it gave me chills, and I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I actually had to pull over and stare to keep from driving off the road.

Explain how the first time I went to Alaska, I just felt really at home.

Have you ever been to a place that just touched your soul to the core? Somewhere that just hits home so hard with you that when you leave and go back home, you feel like something deep down is missing. Like a part of you… is missing. All you can think about is how bad you want to go back to that place, just to be back there. And then when you finally do go back, everything just feels so right again. Your soul feels centered… and grounded… like you’re finally back where you belong. When you’re apart from that place, that feeling of restlessness and longing for that place… it’s like you’re homesick. Now obviously ‘homesick’ means you’re missing being home, but even though that place isn’t your home… it’s the same feeling. Maybe you get homesick for the beach, or homesick for the mountains.

And that’s exactly what it felt like for me. I was homesick for Salt Lake City, I was homesick for Devil’s Tower. I was homesick for Alaska. I could close my eyes and think about those places, and it’s like I was back there. I could see the buildings and houses, I could see the mountains as I was driving down the highway, I could almost smell the pine trees hiking up to Devil’s Tower. Like how certain smells or certain songs can take you back to a specific instant in time so clearly that it’s like you’re there again, with memories of things you’d completely forgotten about all coming back in such vivid detail... All the memories came rushing in, and they were all so perfectly detailed, so crystal clear, it’s like my physical body was here sitting in this chair, but my soul, my senses, sight, smell, hearing.. they were in that other place…. but here’s the thing.

I had never once… been to any of these places…

Not once.

[TITLE SCREEN]

We’ve all heard the term ‘wanderlust’ before. That urge to just travel and be somewhere new. Doesn’t really matter where; you just want to get up and go see somewhere new. You’re just addicted to travel. Drive the highway with no place in mind. Hop a last minute flight for a weekend trip to somewhere you’ve been a million times. Just go… somewhere… anywhere.

But then there’s something the Germans call “fernweh”, and that is something else entirely. It literally translates to ‘far pain’, or to put it another way… "farsickness”. It’s exactly what it sounds like. Being homesick for somewhere far away, but it goes deeper than that. To the Germans, fernweh is so much more than just that longing to travel. It’s almost a spiritual connection to someplace. Like a nostalgia that happens when you go back to a place that instantly stirs up fond memories and makes you feel… back. The thing is, homesickness… nostalgia… those are feelings for places you’ve been. Farsickness is that same feeling, but for somewhere you’ve never been.

Now please understand, this isn’t one of those things like “oh I’ve always loved Paris, I’ve always dreamed of going to Paris one day and seeing the Eiffel Tower. I even learned French because one day I’m going to go. It’s on my bucket list!”

This feeling, this farsickness… this is like a spiritual longing deep down in your soul. And nothing… and I mean NOTHING… satisfies it. It never goes away. You’d think the best way to deal with it would be to actually go to the place that’s making you feel the farsickness. But the thing is… once you get there, even while you’re there, you still feel this weird… restlessness. The closest thing I can think of to describe it would be like when you leave the house to go run errands or whatever, and you think to yourself… “did I forget to lock the door”? That nagging feeling that just stays in the back of your mind the whole time you’re out, the whole time you’re headed back home to see if you actually did forget to lock the door. Then that relief you get when you turn the knob and feel that the door is locked, and that sense of closure you get as the worry just fades away in that instant. Except with farsickness, that relief never comes. No matter how many times I come to Salt Lake City, no matter how many times I sit and stare up at Devil’s Tower, that farsickness knows I can’t stay here forever. And with every second that passes bringing me closer to that moment where I have to get in the car and start driving away…
[USE SHOTS OF DEVIL’S TOWER IN REAR VIEW MIRROR]
that farsickness… it’s like it’s been there the whole time.

Now I know I’m not the only one who’s experienced this. There are Reddit groups, Quora threads… just google the word farsickness and you’ll spend hours going down the rabbit hole. For those of you who were alive in the 70’s I’m sure you remember the movie Close Encounters.
[INSERT SCENES FROM MOVIE]
Remember how Richard Dreyfus became so obsessed with Devil’s Tower he started drawing it over and over? The famous scene of him sculpting it out of mashed potatoes? Remember how he went mental and destroyed his living room to build this huge scale model of it? The whole time having no idea what it was, or why he was obsessed with it. Until one day he was watching the news, and boom there it was on tv. That aha moment where the dots finally connected. So the big question is then… how do you satisfy that feeling? How do you finally get that closure of putting the key in the lock and finding out you did lock the house after all? Well… I think I may actually have the answer.

Explain how Alaska never felt ‘done’. It never felt ‘resolved’. A constant feeling I had unfinished business there. The more I thought about it, the more I got to asking myself, why did I go there in the first place? I kept replaying every trip to Alaska back in my mind? The first time I went, before I had even left, I knew I’d be back. Something deep down told me I’d be back, that Alaska wasn’t done with me. So I went back a few months later in the winter to make a video for my channel. But even after I left that time, the video felt incomplete. It just felt… not done. So I went back the again to finish the video. Except this time, instead of me taking charge and planning everything out, I just kind of sat back and recorded things as they happened. We’d be driving along and something would just tell me to pick up my camera and start shooting. And I did. And all of a sudden, all the shots I wanted to get just started happening. All the words I wanted to say just started flowing through my head faster than I could jot them down. And you know what? When I left Alaska that time… I felt… finished. Now that’s not to say I’ll never go back again, but this time when I do, that overwhelming feeling, that longing, that… NEED to be there, like some deep down cosmic force is pulling me in and won’t let me go… I don’t feel that anymore. It just feels… quiet. I did lock the house up after all.

I believe that we’re all put on this Earth for a whole list of reasons, and a lot of those reasons, we may find ourselves in the right place, but at the wrong time. Sometimes that feeling of longing for somewhere, that deep down feeling that ties you to somewhere… that’s that place telling you you belong here at some point. There’s something waiting for you here. Maybe not right now, but one day you’ll come here, and you’ll find it. And you’ll know when you do.

See I’ve noticed a lot of people when they have certain feelings like this, or feelings they don’t understand, or that may feel kind of uncomfortable, they run from it. They drown it out. They focus on something else. They make themselves busy to distract themselves from it.
[CUT TO SHOT OF ME SHAKING MY HEAD LIKE “NOT ME”]
I welcome it. I embrace it. I want to know why it’s here and why I’m feeling it, and what it’s trying to tell me. Anyone that knows me… ANYONE that knows me knows… I can’t walk away from stuff like that. I’m like Dr. House - I have to solve the puzzle. You know when you’re watching a movie and you see that actor, and you’re like “GOD where have I seen him”? I literally will not be able to stop until I figure out where I know him from. So you can imagine, the first time I experienced farsickness, I had to know what it was. And I couldn’t stop until I did, and it wasn’t just one place that made me feel it. It was several. And ooooh the places it’s taken me. The people I’ve met, the places I’ve been… I firmly believe it’s what lead me to start my Youtube channel. I mean I do my own shooting, my own planning, and editing.. it’s a LOT of work, and I don’t think I would be doing this if I had never felt that farsickness. And maybe for whatever reason, this is what I was meant to do. And honestly, I wouldn’t take back one second of it. So these places that call out to you, I firmly believe that they’re telling you something is waiting for you there. It may not make sense at first. It may even take several times going to that place before you find out what it is, but… it’s there. And honestly, the vast majority of people watching this may never understand or experience what I’m talking about. I’ve actually only met a very small handful of people that have ever really felt this farsickness that I’ve been talking about, and those of you who have, you get it… it’s real. And for those of you who haven’t, one day some of you will. And trust me… there’s nothing in this world like it. And if you have experienced it… reach out. I’d love to hear…

That’s it for me for now. Thanks for watching.