Why Travel? (For Business or Pleasure)
Growing up, my Dad was an Engineer and my Mom stayed home with my sister and I. We didn’t have a lot of discretionary money. What we did have, we used for vacations, which we tried to do one to two times a year. Thanks to my Dad’s job in Technical Sales (which required a lot of travel) we could afford to take nice vacations on his loyalty points for hotels and airlines. Mom and Dad also insisted on hotels with a free breakfast which my sister and I were required to stuff ourselves full on, and then we took food from the free breakfast for lunch. (We ate a lot of bagels and peanut butter for lunches on vacation.) We laugh about it now, but it’s the only way we could afford to travel when I was growing up.
During this time, I learned two things about travel:
1) I wanted to travel for my job, like my Dad did
2) I wanted to vacation as much as I could in my free time
But why? Why did I want to travel for both work and pleasure? And why should you?
I think the answer to these questions finally came to me when I was on a road trip from Wisconsin to Montana with my fiancé. I had just gotten back from a business trip in New York City and we were cruising at 80 miles per hour across the South Dakota landscape. Then it hit me. The vast differences between where I had just been and where I was now. Two days ago, I had been shoulder to shoulder with thousands of people in the heart of one of the biggest cities in the world.
And now, there wasn’t a single person, single building, single being in sight.
I was in the same country, but there was almost nothing similar about these two locations.
That is the part about travel I find fascinating. Most people want the same things (love, a roof over their heads, happiness, etc) but how they go about life can be very different. When I travel for work and fun, I see so many different people and places. I eat different kinds of food.
And I get to learn.
When I travel for work, I’m most likely not seeing much more than the inside of a conference room or a manufacturing site, but I get to talk to some amazing people, who live different lives than I do. I get to chat with a bartender at the bar, or the valet at the hotel. I might catch a glimpse of a place I want to revisit with my family. And I get to become a lot more comfortable with travel in general.
When my husband and I pack our kids up for a trip, I feel the same excitement I did when I was their age. Hotels with pools, plane rides, McDonald’s ice cream, new adventures. I can see their world getting bigger and brighter.
I know we are making memories that will last forever.
And that’s why we should travel. However big or small. Expanding our world and our understanding of it brings so much joy to our lives. It causes us to pause and appreciate what we have back in our “normal” lives. It forces us to leave behind the day-to-day. To get creative. To see the world through a different lens.
I know these memories that stem from family vacations will last forever because I can still easily recall many of them from my childhood. Travel is not easy, especially with children. That’s why I’ve created this blog. So that I can share my knowledge of travel with all of you.
