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Motivation-to-Go Travel Tips

I Want to Travel, But I Don't Want to Travel Alone

I Want to Travel, but I don't want to travel alone
Rob and I have fairly similar tastes, but even with us we both get dragged to somewhere we don't want to be and forced to do something we don't really want to do (or rather, watch the other one do). For him it's my obsession with dinosaurs and other "lame" for-kids stuff. And no, I don't mean he thinks the dinos are for kids; I mean I literally drag him to kids' entertainment programs and have no qualm with competing against or playing with twelve year olds. What, I really like face painting and coloring and playing with balloons. haha. But when you travel solo, you only have to go where you want to go. You don't have to compromise with someone else or feel bad about wanting a detour to something only you will fully enjoy.

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I Want to Travel, But I'm Afraid It'll Ruin My Future

lifelong vagabonds picking apples on a working holiday in New Zealand

I hear this a lot, mostly from people aged 17 – 25 who are now fully expected to enter the 'real world' of bills, work, and a money definition of success. They dream of falling in love with a foreign accent, of petting the wild kangaroos of Pebbly Beach, of learning to fly and sail to all ends of the earth or maybe just a corner. But as they are repeatedly told they must apply for universities and well-paying positions, their dreams slowly die – only to resurface as regret years on down the line. So I'm here to tell you, through my own personal experience, that it doesn't have to be that way. You're young with your whole life ahead of you and travelling for a gap year does not ruin your future. If anything, it betters it.

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I Want to Travel, But No One I Know Seems to Approve

a Korean ward to fight off evil

Traveling forces you to grow in all of these ways and more. It forces you to accept that some things are just weird and different and don't need to be changed even though they don't correspond with your values and opinions. Like hanging strings outside to ward off evil spirits as seen in the photo or the Spanish siesta where everything shuts so people can sleep in the middle of the day (as if getting out of bed once isn't hard enough...) or where they believe in a entirely different religion. Who cares if they believe in Allah instead of the Flying Spaghetti Monster as long as neither promotes violence?

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I Want to Travel, But I Have a Difficult Medical Problem

a wheelchair sign

I hate the word 'suffer' when talking about a medical problem. We (I 'suffer' from chronic pain) shouldn't automatically be labelled as something incomplete, as people that can't ever have a joyful or fulfilling life because well, screw that. Yeah, we might hurt a hell of a lot more and yeah, we might struggle with some everyday tasks, but we are not incomplete. We are not people to be pitied and WE DO NOT need to be told that we can't do something a 'healthy, full-bodied person' can simply because we're a bit different. And the same goes for traveling for there are even people that do so in wheelchairs. Solo.

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I Want to Travel, But I'm Scared of Being Murdered

People butchering other people and pirates kidnapping tourists make for good stories ('good' meaning profitable here and not the moral value of the word). You never hear about the good side of things, about the church in Brisbane that runs as a half-way house, about how some homeless guys fed me and helped me while I was lost, or about all of the people I hitchhiked safely with even in countries where I didn't speak the local language. According to the media, I should have been raped, robbed, beaten, human-trafficked, and killed.​ But I wasn't - me, a small female on my own.

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Lifelong vagabonds travel tips