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Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness…
Mark Twain wrote the above in The Innocents Abroad, a travel book published in 1869 detailing his excursion by boat to Europe and the Holy Land.
Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder a part of experience.
That one is by Francis Bacon.
My traveling started late. Too poor, too introverted, and too anxious to do the traditional year of “backpacking around Europe” between high school and college (which, to be honest, is really only done by rich white kids anyway), I found my traveling legs only after securing meaningful employment. Which, of course, restricts the number of days off for traveling. Eventually I did get to travel, with my first excursion like Mark Twain’s, albeit in the opposite direction – I went to Asia. The culture shock was good for me, opening my eyes to the vast differences, and equally vast similarities, between my monochromatic upbringing and my new world view.
Another quote attributed to Mark Twain is:
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
I concur. I’ve had some opportunities I’ve passed up, including watching the annual 4th of July fireworks from the World Trade Center towers many years ago; that opportunity is gone forever. I’ve visited the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and felt too rushed to wait in line to climb the tower itself; chances are I’ll never be back. I regret not doing those things. But I can’t recall too many things I did that I regret. They didn’t always work out well, but the experience is a memory for life.
Such is the elixir of life. Travel. Climb the tower. Drive the gravel roads, and the curvy roads, and the non-roads. See the world, and live the life.
David J. Kent is the author of Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America, in Barnes and Noble stores now. His previous books include Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity (2013) and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World (2016) and two e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.
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Hot White Snow 
Travel is wonderful, and you don’t need a resort to do it.
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True. Sometimes it’s just a road trip.
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To generalize a bit, I think one needs a bit of routine but also a bit of variety. Deciding upon the proper balance of the two is the trick.
The routine can make life go by too quickly but can also be a welcome restorative from emotional stresses.
Variety on the other hand stimulates thought and creates memories.
I remember being stranded on the south side of the straits of Gibraltar without a return ticket about 25 years ago. That created an opportunity to spend more time in Ceuta than I had panned.I think the ferry ticket-taker accidentally took both tickets on the forward trip. Not a big deal if you have lots of cash, but for me at the time it was a
momentary crisis.
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Ah, those little unexpected crises can be nerve-racking, but also provide great stories to tell forever.
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That’s what’s known as “type-III fun”… those times better experienced as stories. Bad water in Malaysia, hijacked in Cambodia, arrested in Ensenada, missing the last train, arriving just before the flight… at the wrong airport, no toilet-paper, no toilet, stuck skiing a chute in Colorado, hiking up Hieizan into clouds in 38°C heat, suddenly realizing that my room was where the working bar-girls and lady-boys took their customers, getting off the bus alone in a one-intersection town in northern Thailand and trying to negotiate a ride into the mountains in a foreign language, falling asleep in a refugee camp to the sounds of gunfire just over the Burmese border, the children in the Steung Meanchey dump, bad gasoline and dropping my motorcycle on a muddy road, finding out about temple dogs and getting a rabies vaccination, Dengue…
But I wouldn’t be any more willing to give up a single one of those stories any more than I’d allow a piece of my brain to be removed.
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That’s a good collection, but I bet you have many more. Autobiographies can get tediously verbose, but I’d bet you could pull it off. I pulled out a paperback version of Bertrand Russell’s that I had started reading about 30 years ago and was sort of appalled.
It is good to practice recalling things; but not so good to recall the same things. That (recollection of the same thing) seems to be a pattern in aging brains. But if it makes one happy…..
One of my favorite miseries was whilst camping/fishing near Denali. Mosquitoes were really thick. Most of the group were uncomfortable, but a good mate of mine went screaming running into the woods to jump in the ice cold water. That then became a project.
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I suppose there is a tendency to repeat the same “adventure” in different places. I’ve dealt with mosquitoes and ice cold water, though not on Denali (still on my list). It’s the little things that you can do in one place and not any other that make for the best experiences.
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An auto-b isn’t likely. Maybe too much like listening to my mom.
Denali is no longer on any lists. Alaskan mosquitoes… definitely type-III!
ლಠ益ಠ)ლ
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Such adventure! I’ll have to keep that in mind – “Type III fun” = fun only appreciated in hindsight once survival is confirmed. This is why you need to write a book.
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Concur. Never owned a motorcycle, but I’ve borrowed them. Laying one down is probably a terrifying thing.
Becoming an ambidextrous driver was not that hard for me, but if you add on an element of central city traffic through roundabouts it’s enough to inspire the “London Homesick Blues”.
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I’ve driven mopeds in Bermuda, and cars in Scotland and Ireland, so I’m hoping I won’t have any problem driving on the left side of the road in Australia and New Zealand later this year.
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Working a manual transmission left handed takes a bit of adjustment.
When I first moved back to the US after an extended period, I would sometimes wake-up driving on the wrong side on the way to work at 6 AM. That bothered me.Reminds me of the Swedish changing sides story.
https://www.wired.com/2014/02/throwback-thursday-sweden/
Driving in Scandanavia is serious business though; highly regulated, probably a good tax revenue stream.
In other more lax places, every intersection is a game of chicken. That is nerve racking. I don’t think I could do that every day. I like to think about other things than competitive transportation.
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I can see why countries wouldn’t want to change driving sides. I suppose it works best for countries that are isolated from their right-sided neighbors.
The transition to manual left-side shift was effortless for me as I had been driving a manual stick shift in the US before moving to Brussels and can fake ambidexterity when needed. I’ve been driving automatic transmission cars since my return, however, so we’ll see how it goes.
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Easier than switching languages for sure.
I can barely get by in a few romance/latin based languages but not anything else really. Although, Finnish has been interesting to me for a while. Haven’t studied up on it, but supposed to be most closely related to Hungarian.
But all of these things force one to expand your imagination and then in turn dilate time. I think that is desirable.
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We traveled here, went back, returned, and it changed us. But the world changed too and there’s always that sense that we wish we’d done more.
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I wished I had done more early on; now I’m trying to make up for it.
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