I have a growing concern that I have watched simmer for a bit with my friends and family. It has to do with our seemingly endless dribble of our many vacations. As our travel appetite has increased, so has the locales, many exotic, that we find ourselves in quite often. Understand my wife and I fully comprehend the wonderful gift of travel that we have been afforded. My kids, albeit a bit young, even now are starting to realize that not everyone has the opportunity that we have. We encourage them not to boast or gloat, but simply to enjoy. Part of my appetite includes wanting to hear about everyone else and the trips they plan. I simply enjoy hearing of the adventure and I really don’t care how small the trip may be, because in my eyes, a trip is a trip and it is a chance to live outside the usual bounds and the binds that tie us down.
Don’t Keep Up With the Joneses. Make Your Own Destiny With Travel!
I encourage, I preach, I even beg for people to make the same moves in life that we have successfully made ourselves. I’m a firm believer that a traveling soul is a happy soul. So it bothers me when I feel others may perceive us as travel snobs. If you travel as much as we do, and my guess is that most of you do, it’s entirely possible that you have received the same reactions as we have a time or two. Even last week, a close associate at work asked where we had been, which happened to be the Caribbean. It sometimes gets lost on me that a trip like this seems so out of reach for many people, maybe even a trip of a lifetime, while for us, we at least try to get down there once or twice a year. When we asked where she was heading, the response was a somewhat blasé “We’re just heading to the beach somewhere in Florida”. As if this was a negative? My immediate response was, “Yeah! The beach is good! I don’t care where it is! Sounds like a blast!” The demeanor changed after this reaction, which was what I had hoped for in the end. Never in a million years did I ever want to become that person, the snob.
Travel Transforms You
My goal in life and in this blog is to prove to everyone that travel is never too far away, and the best trip that you can ever be on is the one you are on right now! It’s a medicinal approach if you will. I’m starting to research a bit the power of travel and how it transforms us. The journey is not all-encompassing. It is only a facet of the bigger picture, which is the feeling. The feeling that lingers long after you return home and resume “normal” life. It’s not necessary to make every trip a big one. The park, the zoo, the farm or even an open field can do the trick. That same feeling from a big trip can just as easily be captured with the small, seemingly insignificant ones. There’s one lesson that should be learned from this travel hobby of ours. There is never an insignificant trip. They all have an end goal in mind, and that is happiness. Being happy isn’t where you go; it’s the feeling you have when you’re there. It can’t be captured on film nor recorded on video. It’s something that sticks with you much longer and gets pulled out every so often in the darkest of times. To try to explain that feeling is a waste of your precious time, because only those who have been in the moment can fully comprehend how important it is to their well-being. Rejoice in others adventures and you will find yourself enjoying yours even more. Because if we all traveled and we all took some time to experience that feeling, the world would be a much better, more tolerant place. Here’s to all of you who have experienced the feeling and to those who will feel it soon. Prepare yourself because there’s no turning back. Wanderlust.
Live Within Your Means, Travel Beyond Them!
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