Why We Travel?

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again—to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.
-By Pico Iyer- 

The postcards made it back to Canada way before I did and suddenly I hear the open road and the airline website calling my name. My travel feet start to itch and the desire to get lost in another land has return. Although I don’t really think the desire to explore was ever really gone. I had just for a while managed to stop listening to it. I put on my pink fuzzy slippers and managed to convince myself small adventures around Kuwait would be just fine. I am now feeling that five new countries this year just might not be enough. 

Perhaps there is time for one more glorious weekend trip before I too go home to Canada? It would be nice to hand deliver new postcards. 

Hi, my name is Christine and I am a travel addict  

Abroad is the place where we stay up late, follow impulse and find ourselves as wide open as when we are in love. We live without a past or future, for a moment at least, and are ourselves up for grabs and open to interpretation. We even may become mysterious—to others, at first, and sometimes to ourselves—and, as no less a dignitary than Oliver Cromwell once noted, “A man never goes so far as when he doesn’t know where he is going.”

There are, of course, great dangers to this, as to every kind of freedom, but the great promise of it is that, traveling, we are born again, and able to return at moments to a younger and a more open kind of self. Traveling is a way to reverse time, to a small extent, and make a day last a year—or at least 45 hours—and traveling is an easy way of surrounding ourselves, as in childhood, with what we cannot understand.
-By Pico Iyer-