Our regular blog readers know the cornerstone of our life philosophy: great lives are made up of great experiences and great relationships. Part of what attracts us so compellingly to travel is that it is an opportunity to develop both experiences and relationships. The last few months of preparation in particular have illustrated the latter so nicely for us.
Anyone who’s traveled a bit knows that it’s natural to meet and connect with fellow travelers. You have a lot in common before you’ve even met: you both love travel and you both have similar ideas of where you want to go and what you want to see (otherwise you wouldn’t have bumped into each other). We’ve definitely looked forward to this aspect of our upcoming full-time travel.
But what we’ve also discovered is that there’s a huge community of travelers with much of those things in common who either haven’t even started traveling (like us) or they’re already traveling and the power of the Internet allows them to cross paths even if they never actually meet. In our planning, research, and preparation we started reading travel blogs, we bookmarked quite a few, we commented on some of them, we struck up a conversation with a few, and we’ve even had dinner with some of them. We started tweeting and met still more socially-engaged travelers. We started pinning our “where-we-want-to-go” dreams on Pinterest, renewed our interest and use of Facebook after months of dormancy, and created accounts on socially-enabled sites as diverse as Yelp and Rick Steve’s forums.
And when we’ve told our “real world” friends what we’re planning to do, it invokes a fresh round of conversation and interest, often with a comment similar to, “I’ve always wanted to travel like that,” and requests to post lots of pictures to Facebook, sign us up for your email, or let them hide in our suitcase. We might not be able to take them all in our suitcase, but we’ll gladly share our experiences from our travels.
We haven’t even left yet, and we already feel that travel has enriched our lives that much more.
