Ahhh travel.  Is there anything better than the feeling you get when you’re headed to a new place?  Or that exploration of a foreign spot or coming home after and feeling like you’ve truly changed from the inside out?  There are hundreds of reasons to fall in love with travel but when I really sat down and thought about it, there are 5 reasons to fall in love with travel that stand out to me, that I keep coming back to over and over, and why I keep on seeing the world, why I keep traveling and why traveling will always be a huge love of my life.

1.  The lead up.

There is no better feeling than the excitement before a trip somewhere.  That excitement that just beams out of us.  For me, it hits me mid-flight when I think about what’s on the other end.  That lead up makes me fall in love with travel over and over again, no matter if it’s a place I’ve been before or somewhere new and foreign, it’s an incredible part of this crazy wonderful thing we call travel.

2.  Opening up your eyes and mind.

There is no better way to open your mind, heart and eyes than to travel.  Traveling shows you how millions of other people out there live and breathe and love.  It shows us that we have more in common than different and that we really don’t know everything or the best way to do anything.  When you travel, you let yourself be opened up to new experiences, new people, new places.  It opens our hearts, it opens our minds, it opens our eyes.

3.  Exploration.

There is something about wandering a foreign place, exploring, getting lost, finding hidden gems and finding your way back again.  That exploration is good for the soul, it’s good for our minds.  Exploring this planet we call home is not only a necessity in my opinion, it’s also an exercise in strength, in curiosity, in learning.  Exploring a place that you don’t know is an incredible feeling and it opens us up to a literal world full of exploration.

4.  Growing as a person.

I truly believe that you can’t learn what you get from traveling any way else.  There are some things in this world that are just meant to be seen with our own eyes, touched with our own fingers or explored with our own feet.  Whether it’s been the Angkor temples of Cambodia or the colorful cities of India, or the Eiffel Tower in Paris or wandering the Thames in London, there are countless places on this Earth that have made me grow, that add to your experience as a person.  Seeing those things, feeling them, exploring them, and coming back home after teaches you to grow as a person more than perhaps anything else in the world.  I am forever changed after each trip I take no matter how close or far I go, because travel moves us, it envelops us and teaches us lessons we can not learn any other way.

5.  Memories made.

I can’t even tell you how many memories I’ve made around the world in different places, unique experiences that have shaped me, that have created stories in me that I will forever remember.  Moments like seeing the Eiffel Tower from our balcony in Paris on our honeymoon, like riding in the back of a tuk tuk through the streets of Udaipur with Hindi music blaring and the world flying past us, like standing in the middle of the Icelandic wilderness without another human for miles, like watching the sun set over the Manhattan skyline, like hiking through a slot canyon in the middle of New Mexico.  I could go on and on.  But the truth is that travel creates incredible stories within us, each different, each unique and those memories made will forever shape us as we go forward.