10 Unheralded Reasons Why Travel Is Good For You As An Adult

go with me on this--in more ways than one!

I wanted to come up with an interesting, maybe unconventional list of why I love travelling, and why you should come with me to Ireland this October! So all I did was plumb my weird thoughts and out came this list.

Some reasons on this list may seem self-evident but they are surprisingly impactful. We’re adult women travelling now. And sometimes we just need to be reminded that we’re our own adult people and we can travel by ourselves, or with friends, and that it’s important even if we’re boring, old adults! I’m sure you have much better reasons to add, so let me know.

Let’s get to it!

Gets you out of a rut in more ways than one

I don’t want to say that finding yourself in a rut is just a symptom of middle age, but I am leaning that way. It’s so easy for us to get caught up in our routines, our schedules, our endless list of adult-ing that we have to do on a daily basis that basically repeats every single week. And while we are living happy, good lives in doing this liturgy of the ordinary, where the actual action of our work keeps ourselves/other people alive, while we bring up and educate our children, and love and care for spouses and family members, we can easily find ourselves in a personal rut where we find ourselves bored with ourselves. Have we forgotten what brings us joy or have we just had no time to remember it? Travelling gets us physically out of our usual space, but also mentally shakes us up. We can experience new things and notice them. It’s not just the new place that is exciting, but a new opportunity of seeing the world and ourselves in a new way. We are given time out of our usual place to see things not just of the world but in ourselves.

Seeing the Value and Marvellousness of What Place Can Mean

Newsflash: travel is amazing because you go to a different location! I know, you are blown away by my insight here. But as someone who loves to read and has fallen in love with different settings in novels, or historical landmarks as I read about a particular period of history, actually being in the place where only your mind has travelled before is wonderful. You realize these places are actually real! They have sounds and scents uniquely their own, you feel the cobbles of the road and will be able to remember that feeling forever. Or you visit a place where over the course of hundreds of years people have found sacred meaning within actual, manmade walls. It is truly a marvel to be able to actually be there, at a physical place and to take in that meaning. And now I’ll just go deal with the floods of emails from publishers asking me to write a book about this epiphany!

Meeting New People Helps You Like People Again

Meeting new people in new places somehow has the effect of making you like people again. I’m not sure if we need a mix up of countries to make the goodness of people become more apparent, but it is a fact that new people in other countries are just more interesting. When you’re travelling you’re going to meet new people who have great accents, who drink beer at different temperatures, or share whispers with you in a darkened church. If you’re really lucky and can travel for a while with these new people (hint, hint, a pilgrimage will give you amazing people to travel with!) then you truly meet some incredible people you would never have met otherwise. You are in awe of the things they’ve done, the way they live their lives, and how you can connect so quickly over shared interests and the shared experience of seeing new places together! You are amazed that you like people again!

Planning/Anticipating a Trip is Worth the Price of the Trip

Now, this principle applies to both those of us who enjoy researching and planning out a trip, AND those of us who cower in fear of making so many decisions! While some of us, and me on a good day, enjoy planning and looking at different sites to visit or hotels to book, this causes panic attacks in others. For the planners just planning a trip is a project with multitudes of personal satisfaction. For those of you who just want the ease of travel and having everything taken care of for you then is travelling with a tour company like Select is going to be the best thing since sliced bread! And for those who just want to travel, simply having a trip on the calendar is a source of daily happiness until the day of departure—and we should not count these feelings as unimportant! They’re wonderful! These feelings of happy anticipation can bolster our moods, get us through difficult grinds, and fuel us through times of intense pressure. I say we appreciate those feelings out loud.

Travel is an Amazingly Fast Way to Figure Out What You Actually Like

This one is weird, but I like thinking about this as a concept because again, most of us having pretty boring, regular, ordinary lives and we get used to the same things. But when you travel you are exposed to a bunch of new things, and suddenly, as you’re making new choices that you wouldn’t have to make in normal life you realize that some of those choices you like and some you don’t! You don’t have to like traveling on subways. You really like the ability to choose to go for an afternoon drink at a pub without having to placate three cranky toddlers. You don’t walking quickly through a museum. You like places that offer silence. You really like walking the streets with locals. The list goes on and on, and the point isn’t just that travelling allows you to do everything you like, but that it offers such a clear direction towards showing you what you like. I find it so interesting because you learn so much about yourself that you may have never known, or things that are new in yourself. We change! We can like and dislike different things as we grow older, and we can learn these new likes and dislikes as we travel and then bring them home to our regular lives. It’s such a heightened and refreshing way to learn about yourself!

You Remember Fun

I did not make this a numbered list because these are weird reasons so kinda hard to rank, but if I was ranking the list this reason should probably be number one. Again, as adults we have a lot on our plates. You may be in a season of intense work, bringing up children, or grief and loss that have taken a lot out of you but also hasn’t been a time conducive to actually having fun. Remember fun? Remember spontaneous joy? It honestly can be a hard thing to find in adult life, but travel is probably the surest way of finding it again. Wondering the streets of a foreign city by yourself, seeing a piece of art created centuries ago, stumbling on a charming neighbourhood, drinking in a pub with your new friends —these are all sources of real fun you probably can’t make time or space for too easily at home. We all want to but it’s hard. When you’re travelling it becomes so easy.

The Ordinary Becomes Extraordinary

In our desensitized world where we see images by the hundreds, maybe thousands, everyday on instagram and elsewhere of perfect, edited, enhanced places in the world it is good to rewaken ourselves to the the reality of the ordinary. We can be in amazing locales but there are still garbage cans. And conversely the ordinary in another country can be the most beautiful thing we see on an extravagant vacation. While I was in the Cotswolds this spring I saw many moss encrusted flower pots on doorsteps. Of course because it was the Cotswolds they were perfect, dripping with charm and romance. But they were actually ordinary. A real, normal, regular person put them there. Seeing the ordinary in exotic or foreign locales reminds us that our ordinary is also beautiful. I mean, it probably isn’t dripping in English countryside charm…

Travel is a Great Reason to Revamp Your Wardrobe

Those closet challenges or curated wardrobes never tempted me. But the idea of having to go to a European city for ten days really puts all my clothing in perspective! Do I have anything that makes me not look like a schlub?? It is this type of constructive pressure that helps me reevaluate everything I own. And honestly, honing in on maybe two or three stylish, yet versatile pieces of clothing can be done! Finding those dream pieces I can’t help you with because I struggled this spring trying to find what I wanted to take to London and came up unsuccessful. But planning travel really makes you think about your clothing differently, and gosh darn it, let’s chalk that up to a good reason to travel!

Travel is Rest (When it’s without your children)

Travelling, not just taking a beach vacation, is rest. It’s rest because it is a break from your usual schedule, and your usual tasks that being at home constantly call you to and the daily mental load of keeping life going. The mental break I get from being away from home still feels slightly unbelievable to me. I will say that this only happens when travelling without kids. And while travelling with kids can be richly rewarding/frustrating, it can never be described as restful. My top tip for traveling in a restful way is signing up for a pilgrimage! When I say everything is taken care of and all you have to do is wake up every morning, I mean it. It is an amazing experience to travel without constant decision fatigue or fear you’re going to be late for that train. If a mental break is what you’re after when travelling, a tour company is just what the doctor ordered.

You’re Reminded of Why You Love Home

Probably the most valuable experience we can gain from travel is to come to a better love and appreciation of home. No matter where our homes may be, no matter how un-exotic or humble, they are dear and lovely because they are where we live. The business of living bestows a sacredness to any home, but then as we create and build our own homes, they become our personal haven. Travelling far from home reminds us that home is a particular place, not a continent or soulless expanse, and that it is special because it is ours. Of course there are a million ways to see this truth and it will be unique and particular to you alone as you journey near or far.

And now I want to invite you to Ireland with me this October as

Katie Marquette

and I have joined with Select International to plan a journey through Ireland’s sacred and beautiful places.

We will be visiting the Shrine of Our Lady of Knock, Croagh Patrick, the Cliffs of Moher, Trinity College in Dublin, as well as whiskey tastings and fun adventures in small Irish villages. It’s really a wonderful itinerary of everything you’d want to see and do in Ireland. I’d love for you to come!

Here is the link for all the trip details, and if you have any questions please don’t hesitate to shoot me a message.