Why Travel

All of the past two days was taken up with time in a car to get to the airport to fly 2.5 hours, wait 2 hours, fly 12.5 hours and wait 3 hours before flying 6.5 more hours until I arrive at my destination.  At the end of the journey is a culture so different from my own.  So why do I do it?   I inherited my wanderlust - my Papaw McCarter had it and my parents certainly had it.  They taught it to me.

"The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page." ~ St. Augustine

I want to read the whole book. And each page I read is a new way of understanding myself and those around me just a little bit better:

"Bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God." ~ Kurt Vonnegut

"Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it." ~ Eudora Welty

"Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the idea of living." ~ Miriam Beard

"I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world." ~ Mary Anne Radmacher Hershey

How does it change you, you ask?

"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 aquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime." ~ Mark Twain

"Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all people cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends." ~ Maya Angelou

I truly am a born traveller:

"For the born traveller, travelling is a besetting vice.  Like other vices, it is imperious, demanding it's victims time, money, energy and the sacrifice of comfort." ~ Aldous Huxley

For "Not all those who wander are lost." ~ JRR Tolkein