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The idea of traveling is thrown around often, usually as a want or desire, but rarely as a necessity. I believe in the latter, traveling is vital for your development and understanding of the world. However, making the decision to travel is very complex and sometimes overwhelming. There are many sacrifices that have to be made to travel for long periods, or honeymoon indefinitely, in our case. From holidays and birthdays to modern comforts there are plenty of things you will miss out on as a traveler. Furthermore, there is an immense amount of learning and planning necessary to embark on long-term travel. Be sure not to get caught up in all of these necessary steps that should follow the decision to travel. The most important step is deciding you want and need to do it. These are the three reasons I decided I needed to honeymoon (travel) indefinitely.
For Myself
Traveling was always important to me, making no less than four trips a year with friends to party all over the country. I moved to Washington, DC for college then to Los Angeles for no other reason than I had never been. My dream was always to move abroad for an extended period of time after gallivanting across the United States. Living abroad was a fairy tale for me, it was whimsical and fun to imagine myself accomplishing this dream, yet I thought it was so ambitious that it would not be a failure to simply dream of it forever. When I decided to move to LA I had no idea how I would logistically go about moving across the country, but I did it. I made a fairy tale my reality and my confidence soared. It was by no means an easy feat, but I learned one of the most valuable lessons in my life: If you fail, you will not turn to dust. I had this ridiculous image in my mind of myself vaporizing if I set out to achieve something and failed.
When my college roommate and I became homeless our first week in Los Angeles with $300 to our name, we did not vaporize. Instead, we went to Motel 6 in Inglewood and rented a room. Eventually finding the steal of a century, essentially house sitting for a family friend, we marveled at our ability to persevere. Fast forward two years later, we had an apartment on the famous Wilshire Blvd, offering our sofa to anyone that wanted to move to Los Angeles with no concrete plan, as we did. This experience changed me, exposing my strengths and disproving my fears. Travel, especially long-term travel, does that to you. It forces you to use parts of yourself that you didn’t know existed, while eliminating the blockades you’ve created to inhibit them. I loved this evolution and wanted more. I wanted to be the best and truly believed travel was the only way to fulfill my full potential.
For My Marriage
When I married my best friend we took a weeklong road trip across the country driving from Los Angeles to Ohio to start our life together. We had an immense amount of fun exploring new cities together, but the best parts of the trip came in the car as we drove through the desert in Nevada, caves and craters in Utah and mountains in Colorado. Fresh off of our private wedding in Las Vegas, we knew we were different than our peers. From the way we chose to get married, never cohabitating before our vows, to the huge black diamond that now resided on my left ring finger, we were not the norm.
The best thing we did on that trip was creating a list of characteristics describing the man and woman we wanted to become. Our ideals overlapped at several points: entrepreneurial, well traveled, bilingual. After we finished this exercise we committed to pushing each other towards embodying these characteristics, as they were vital for our ideal developments. By the time we reached Columbus, Ohio we were both exhausted and disappointed that the journey was over. Looking at a map and realizing you went from point A then traveled 3,000 miles to reach point B does something wonderful to your spirit and confidence. I believe that trip foreshadowed our future. We had identified our common desire to continue to travel while proving that we enjoyed traveling together. The seed was planted and we decided the best way to begin our joined life was to honeymoon indefinitely as we traveled the world together, creating the lifestyle we wanted.
For My Future Children
My desire to be a mother, in my opinion, required an immense amount of growth and experience. My parents traveled a great deal together and it always made them extremely helpful and knowledgeable in my life. I acknowledged the importance of their travel early on in my development and knew I wanted to further their adventures in my life for my own children. My husband agreed with this sentiment, traveling would be great for us, but it would be vital for our children. All the things that we want our children to be, we must become. If we want our children to have a global perspective, then we must become global-minded. If we desire our children to be bilingual, we too should be bilingual. We want to raise children that would be more interested in understanding themselves and experiencing the world than going to college. To raise children with this mindset, yet have no personal experience of the world ourselves, would be a disservice to them. Traveling quickly moved from a want to a need. It was a requirement for us to travel the world if we ever wanted to evolve into the people we dreamed of becoming.
This article was originally posted in 2013, but has been pushed up to allow readers to get to know us and our decision without having to scroll through all of my posts. 🙂
What do you think?