Over the past year, and particularly the past month, the urge within me to travel has grown. I've tried to smother it, to convince myself that travel is, for someone my age, an unnecessary luxury. I've told myself that there will be time to see the world... when I'm older, freer, and perhaps more experienced. Nevertheless, I fear that I have not successfully contained my enthusiasm for all that has any slight thing to do with travel.
Without realizing it, my collection of quotes on the subject of travel has grown, I've added multiple maps to my collection, and I've bookmarked many a place I would one day would like to find myself. It is not until this moment, as I am writing this, that I have realized the extent to which travel has inundated my life. Yes, a love for the idea of travel is very commonly found among my peers and often considered a (hipster-esque) trend of which to steer clear, yet I wish to act upon this love of travel. I yearn to pick up my bag(s) and find myself in Turkey, Italy, or even Uganda.
This hunger for travel has lead to the creation of concrete(ish) plans. Six months from now I will (hopefully) be on a plane headed to Entebbe, Uganda where I will spend four months doing exactly what I do in Canada. I will study, socialize, and, most importantly, learn a little bit more about the diversity and grandeur of this world. Following these four months I hope to hop on a plane to Europe where I will spend a few months working. What better way to experience another part of the world than to settle down and live there for a short while? After this, my current roommate (and best friend) will join me for 2-3 months of backpacking, making new friends, and living off as little as possible. After eight months of exploration I will return to Canada to once again be bitten by the travel bug... I will then return to fighting the urge to travel until I graduate with a degree in International Studies and a speciality in development and cultural change. From there... who knows!
This is my travel fund... #willingtoworkforadventures!
Below are just a few of the quotes that have inspired made me want to see God's creation more:
"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
- Mark Twain
"Risk-taking is
intelligent. When you do things you don’t normally do, you learn about yourself
- you change, and you evolve."
—Heidi Klum
—Heidi Klum
"Travel is little
beds and cramped bathrooms. It’s old television sets and slow Internet
connections. Travel is extraordinary conversations with ordinary people. It’s
waiters, gas station attendants, and housekeepers becoming the most interesting
people in the world. It’s churches that are compelling enough to enter. It’s
McDonald’s being a luxury. It’s the realization that you may have been born in
the wrong country. Travel is a smile that leads to a conversation in broken
English. It’s the epiphany that pretty girls smile the same way all over the
world. Travel is tipping 10% and being embraced for it. Travel is the same
white T-shirt again tomorrow. Travel is good wine and too many unfiltered
cigarettes. Travel is flowing in the back of a bus with giggly strangers. It’s
a street full of bearded backpackers looking down at maps. Travel is wishing
for one more bite of whatever that just was. It’s the rediscovery of walking
somewhere. It’s sharing a bottle of liquor on an overnight train with a new
friend. Travel is “Maybe I don’t have to do it that way when I get back
home."
- Nick Miller"
It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all- in which case, you fail by default.
-J K Rawling
"For if every true love
affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can’t quite
speak the language, and you don’t know where you’re going, and you’re pulled
ever deeper into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be
a love affair, where you’re left puzzling over who you are and whom you’ve
fallen in love with……all good trips are, like love, about being carried out of
yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder."
— Pico
Ayer
