Why Travel?

Growing up, we didn’t have a lot of money and as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized how amazing my mom and dad were at keeping that fact from us. We had a good childhood, a house, a car, and when we had a windfall of money (like a tax refund), we were always consulted on how best to spend it.

A trip to Disneyland or renovate the rec room downstairs to be a bedroom. In all cases, we chose the practical.

Our trips, then, consisted of camping, eating hot dogs in the pouring rain (I think I loved my dad forever after he stood in the pouring rain with an umbrella cooking for us), and splashing around in lakes, waterfalls, and questionable tidal pools.

It wasn’t until I joined my first wife’s family on a trip to England that I really traveled.

Loving history, how could I not love visiting the castles I read about in books, touching the gravestone of King Richard in New Westminster Abby, or eating fish and chips in a pub in London?

I got the traveling bug. Big time.

In my Joe 2.0 life, we ditched a lot of the ‘practical’ for experiences. We didn’t have the best furniture, but we’d sat in an infinity pool in Santorini and watched the sun go down. We didn’t have the best car, but instead we͛d raced against the rising water as we ran back along the tidal flats outside of Eileen Donin. We didn’t have fancy clothes and my best pair of shoes were Adidas runners, but we sit in Parisian cafes, sipping espressos, eating delicate pastries and being ignored by.

From Hawaii to Mexico to most of Western Europe, we had so many experiences that I wouldn’t trade for having paid off my mortgage or gotten facial reconstructive surgery to make me look like Ryan Gossling.

So, why travel?

You ͛ll meet fellow travelers as excited as you about their trip. You’ll dive into different cultures. You’ll get to eat some amazingly different things. You’ll get to see sights in full, HD 3D. You can touch the stones of a thousand year old castle. You can discover what a dungeon smells like. You can marvel at seeing what man can build.

But there’s one thing you won’t hear a lot about, one more reason I like to travel. You have to overcome all kinds of obstacles. From a soccer field flooded while you’re camped there, to being robbed, to sneaking into a site that’s restricted, to dealing with language barriers, monetary shortages, and all kinds of injuries. It’ll test you and those tests make for the best adventures and the best stories.