In a world where terror attacks are becoming all too regular, where a tiny percentage of humans on this planet want nothing more than to hurt others, when cities are terrorized all over the world by the cowardliness of a few, many often wonder, is it to safe to travel?  Is it safe to go to London or Manchester or Paris or Germany?  Is is safe to head off on that amazing adventure you’ve always dreamed of to those places that might or might not have terror attacks on their soil?  Is is safe to leave our homes, to travel farther beyond our borders?  The answer is a resounding yes.  And beyond that, I firmly and whole heartedly believe it is our duty.

You see here’s the thing, if we fall back and stay home, if we change our lives to be “safer,” to hide behind the walls of our own houses and cities that might not have been affected yet, we’re giving the terrorists exactly what they want.  They want the fear.  You see, in their crazy minds and their cowardly hearts, they think we think like they do.  They think that they will scare us so much that we’ll coward in fear, that we’ll change our lives because of them.  We need to do the opposite.  We need to rise up and say no.  We need to travel, see the world and visit all these places that they’ve tried desperately to sow fear.  We can’t give them what they want and that is first and foremost why I will continue to travel even in the wake of all these horrific events.

As to the question is it actually “safe” to travel, we have to remember that while the risk is getting higher in some places around the world, the world is still a safe place to travel and see.  The world is still full of beautiful and kind people, it’s still full of cities that are standing up to all the terror and protecting us from it.  So if you’re asking yourself if it’s still safe to travel, the answer is a resounding yes.

We can’t live our lives wondering what will happen to us, we can’t live our lives wondering what will do us in.  We can’t create a world of fear of what might happen, we must run face first into the future, expelling more love and kindness in the face of hate.  We must rise up and do what we can to fight against the cowardliness of attacks around the globe.  We must find the strength and courage that they surely don’t have, to say no, we won’t stop living our lives, we won’t bow down to your crazy ideology, and we surely won’t let you take our world away from us.

So is it safe to travel?  The short answer is yes.  And while you should always use caution, no matter where you go, the moral of the story to anyone contemplating a trip out there, GO!  I’ll still be heading to London later this month regardless of what occurred this past week in Britain.  I’ll still be heading to the South of France later this month regardless of what happened in Nice last Summer.  And the reason?  Because I will not let the terrorists win, I won’t let them take away something that unites us all, that teaches us about each other, that allows us to see the world we live in.  I won’t let hate win.