Life Lessons From Traveler

cean air, mountains, city skylines, and dusty trails. There aren’t many feelings compared to experiencing a new place. I didn’t get involved with the traveling lifestyle until I was 22. I went on a Midwest road trip with a childhood friend. With no money and nowhere to go, we just drove. We took shifts sleeping and driving. When we were both too exhausted, we slept in Walmart parking lots. For 3 of the nights we scraped our money together to stay in cheap hotels and survived on mountain dew and beef jerky. It wasn’t pretty, but there’s nothing as freeing as the feeling of driving on Interstate 80 and figuring it out as you go. After that trip, I was hooked. I saw firsthand how I can make traveling part of my life, even with limited resources.

Credit: Caitie King

After that road trip, I traveled a lot. I studied abroad in India and dove into the flavors, the clothing and the people. I then went on a last-minute girls trip to the Bahamas, where I learned that drinking water and wearing sunscreen are essential. From 2016–2018, I was traveling at least once a month on weekend trips throughout the US and Canada. I was working full time, saving for a house, and working towards seeing all 50 states with some international trips mixed in. I traveled with my now-husband (then-boyfriend) and friends, and I even crashed some friends’ family vacations.

I fell in love with eating new foods, listening to new music, meeting new people and hearing the different ways to say the same words.

Credit: Mary Wills

Traveling changed my perspective about life. Like most Americans, I grew up in a small town where there was only one way to do things. Removing myself from that environment and immersing myself in different perspectives challenged my thinking. Each time I spoke with a stranger, even if it was a small exchange at a boutique register, I learned something new. Sometimes strangers would share with me their favorite coffee brand, or their child’s little league experience or even their current conflict, trying to work out a way to resolve it.

I felt that these exchanges, big or small, were important exposures into a life much different than where I started, which further helped me explore the life that I wanted to live.

Roaming the Earth further changed my perspective once I saw how big the world really is. I realized that whatever issue I am facing back home, that issue is not relevant to the grand scheme of world problems. I fell in love with that feeling. I can be sitting on a train from Agra to Mumbai and I am just one ticket in a cabin of fifty strangers. It is freeing to know that the world is a big place, and I am not even a chapter in its history book. It gave me this perspective that I can be and do whatever I set my mind to. I learned that I can find my people, and that sometimes they are found on a train in a crowded place where no one speaks my language.

Credit: Mary Wills

Traveling enhanced my problem solving ability. Each trip presented real-life challenges and myself along with my team were tasked with solving the puzzles. Some puzzles were exciting and fun, other puzzles were rather dangerous that I had to learn to navigate safely.

In 2019, I was lost in a foreign country with no cell service, despite my phone plan advertising my worldwide coverage. While trying to regain cell service, mine and my friend’s phones died and we were trying to find our way to our hotel without a map. It took time, but we looked around for some friendly faces and asked strangers for help. We were given directions to the hotel and once there, we were able to connect to Wifi to navigate the rest of our trip.

Credit: Mary Wills

Although at the time my friend and I were going through this we didn’t particularly enjoy this challenge, it taught us skills on navigation that many millennials lost once the smartphone was introduced. It helped improve our communication skills with each other and encouraged us to connect with a new person to ask for help. I discovered that a large part of traveling is coming prepared, being able to read your surroundings and problem solving when things don’t go as planned.

My traveling adventures, from California to Belize, to India and Vancouver, have taught me the importance of spontaneity and living in the moment. It gave me self-confidence to complete challenges as they come, even challenges that I could not predict. I was able to develop deeper relationships with my traveling companions, and deeper personal meaning.

With no distractions from the world back home, I was able to be myself.

Life Lessons From Traveler