Why I Travel

I began traveling at a young age. My family would spend the summers camping in Northern Michigan, a week or two each year was spent in South Carolina and the neighboring southern states, and the occasional jaunt across the border into Canada.

So I was no stranger to travel when I had my first real experience abroad the summer before my senior year of high school. I spent three weeks in Europe with an organization called People to People International. To say that the experience was life changing would be an understatement. It was the first time I had traveled without my parents, far outside my comfort zone, experiencing cultures vastly different than my own.

I went to museums and castles and ruins.

I lived and breathed art, history, culture, and food.

I was surrounded by people who had the same global mentality as my own.

I credit this experience entirely to my eventual completion of a degree in Global and International Studies, spending a year in AmeriCorps NCCC traveling around the United States, and ultimately this particular endeavor. It was a small taste of the possibilities the world had to offer, and I could not wait to discover as much as possible.

Since that fateful voyage almost a decade ago, I have traveled to fifteen countries, and eleven of their capital cities, on four continents; as well as thirty-three of the U.S. States.

I have been to two of the New7Wonders of the World and tow of the Natural Wonders of the World.

I have been to twenty-two UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

I have set foot in two oceans of the world.

I have traveled by plane, train, and automobile.

It is simple to quantify travel, I have clearly just done so. What is not as easy, is to convey the magnitude of what travel has done to shape me into the person I am now.

I travel because it has become a part of who I am. I have forgotten where the world ends and I begin. I have studied the globe through textbooks and lectures, and then experienced it firsthand by traveling around the world.

I have watched the sun rise and set on all edges of the globe, marveling at the magnificence of watching the world turn. I have gazed upon the night sky in a different hemisphere, and despite the fact that I was looking into a brand new (to me) set of constellations, I felt just as small and insignificant as ever.

I have seen the way that the mountains and oceans seem unchanging amidst the ever-increasing expansion of civilization and how we have become so connected by technology that we assume we know everything there is to know about the world, and yet standing alone in the middle of the woods we realize we really know nothing at all.

The truth of the matter is that traveling changes a person. It opens your eyes, and once you begin, turning back is no longer an option. I have gone far outside my comfort zone to face my fears. I have learned that there is more than one way to live your life and that many people just exist.

Traveling has given me the opportunity to truly live my life to its fullest. The world has so much to offer; its people and its places. It was inevitable that wanderlust filled my life, pushing me to keep moving, exploring, experiencing.

The more places I visit, the more places I want to go.