Why Travel Around the World?

Posted by Mike Richard on April 3, 2007
Filed under: Odds + Ends, Pre-Trip

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Over on the Boots N’ All forums, user Circuitloss rehashes this debate and asks, “Why travel RTW?”.

I’ve never really thought of doing a RTW trip before. What draws you to making a RTW trip over another kind that’s more route or destination focused?

What are the advantages of a RTW trip … ? Is it the length of time, the attraction of spending a year on the road? Is it easier to take a year off for some people than a couple months? Are there other reasons?

For me, “giving it all up” only once is certainly more convenient than having to constantly cycle through working for 2 years, traveling for 6 months, trying to find another job, working for 2 more years, traveling for another X months … rinse and repeat. Giving up everything I know - my job, my family, my girlfriend, and my life as I know it - is likely the hardest decision I’ll ever have made, come next May. I don’t know that I could do it more than once in this lifetime.

Traveling around the world is the ultimate act of wanderlust. It’s about seeing everything there is to see in the short time I have here on this vast blue sphere. It’s about feeling complete freedom and ridding myself of the mundane workaday responsibilities of a 9-to-5 job and a constantly wired life: no cell phone, no Blackberry, no nagging e-mails, no Myspace. It’s about exploring and interacting with cultures in lands that most of my friends will never see and, even worse, probably don’t care to see. It’s about reading the entire book of the world, not merely a single page - the only page you might otherwise have known.

At the end of the day, there are those who understand the neverending need to travel and those who don’t. And it’s unlikely that either will ever convince the other of why they feel the way they do.

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Vagabondish editor, Mike Richard, lives in Rhode Island - a spit of land in the northeastern U.S. He is a professional web designer and travel junkie with an unhealthy addiction to backpacking, camping, hiking and seeing the world. He enjoys knit hats, small, declarative sentences and speaking in the third person.



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