Traveling is good. Traveling does things to you that staying in one place cannot. But traveling poses one of the most difficult questions that a person can be faced with: Where do you want to go?
Most people have a list of places that they'd like to go. Depending on your station in life, that list might include Paris, Tokyo, Disney World, Bora Bora, or Branson, Missouri - all of which are fine choices, if given the right set of circumstances. But that list is probably longer than one place, and you're almost certainly not spending an unlimited amount of time in whichever place you choose, so how you do decide where to go and what to do while you're there?
The truth is that it's hard. I'm lucky, I know it. I've been a lot of places - more places than were originally on my "I have to go there before I die" list, if I'm being honest. And yet, I still want to go places. Every time one place gets crossed off the list, another place gets added. Why? Insatiable thirst for new experiences, I guess, but maybe also just greed.
But maybe it's actually because the first time you go someplace that was on your list, you get an incredible high. That high is slightly lower the next time you cross a place off your list, because the first place was the one you wanted to go to the most. Now that you're going to a place that might be similar to the first place you wanted, you kind of know what to expect. You're harder to "wow."
Does this sound like a drug addiction? Because that's exactly what it's like.
Traveling is an addiction. The first time I left the country was in 2012. I spent 19 days in Europe with one of my best friends. We spent a few days in Vienna, a day in Venice, a day in Bologna, a few days in Florence, a day in Cinque Terre, a day in Milan, a day in Lake Como, another day in Milan (three nights in Milan!), a night on a train to Munich, two days in Munich, and a couple of nights in Prague. Everything was new. Everything was different. We had never experienced anything remotely like it before (unless you count our 8th grade field trip to Toronto, which...you shouldn't count that), and every step of the way offered new experiences and excitement.
18 months later, he lived in London. I went to visit him and took my now-wife along to see him. We visited London, Paris, and a couple of non-London things in England. It was incredible, but I also knew what to expect. It was great, but it wasn't quite as great as the time 18 months earlier. Six months after visiting him, we moved to Milan (there's a lot of Milan here, but I promise it's not that great of a place).
It was the best experience of my life, largely because it allowed us to go a ton of different places for a few days at a time. We acted at the mercy of wherever we could get cheap flights or convenient train tickets, ultimately visiting at least 20 different places over the course of nine months - the real number is probably 15 countries and 35 cities. At some point, after the no-brainer choices of Athens, Rome, Florence, Venice, small-town Switzerland, French Riviera, and a few others were already checked off, we made a physical list of places we would like to go before we moved back to the States. We had about 15 weekends left and we struggled to come up with a list of 15 places we'd like to go.
But we did. And we went to them. And they were incredible. But the fact still remained that we had never "intended" to go to Malta for a weekend - it was never on either of our "we have to go there" lists. Yet somehow, Malta holds some of our favorite memories of our entire year. It's a place that didn't make the "places I need to see" list until my original list in life had been totally completed.
So how do you choose?
At this point, I know that I'll almost certainly never experience the same shock and awe the way I did in 2012. Nor will I feel the same thing I felt the first time I saw the Eiffel Tower. I also won't feel that true sense of bewilderment when we hopped off a train in Mattinata, in southern Italy, realizing that our entire plan to come to this town was based off a conversation I'd had several months earlier but had wholly forgotten. But those are the experiences that turn out the best.
At this point, the best way to travel is to not know what's going to happen. Going on a hiking trip? OK, decide where we want to sleep at night and we'll wing it during the day. Maybe that means we'll end up doing a 10 mile hike, maybe it means we'll instead find a river-lake and just go swimming for two hours instead. Maybe when we're at the river we'll see at bald eagle swoop in and snag a fish. Who knows?
Our last big trip was a safari, which is something you can't do in the States. Before that it was Costa Rica, where you could see monkeys from arm's length away, sloths within ten feet, and volcanoes. And beaches. And toucans. And so much more.
Now what's left is finding places that look different or feel different or offer something I've never seen. I want to see a moose. I want to see a grizzly bear. I want to see the hoodoos of Bryce Canyon in fading sunlight. My tastes have become more specific as a result of the good fortune of having done so many large-scale amazing things.
I'm spoiled. I know. I'm grateful for it. And I still want to get out and do more.
As with so many good things: too much is never enough.
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