Isn’t it strange how some people love to travel and some people just don’t? Once, my sister – just two years younger than me, so with the exact same upbringing – told me that she hated flying and didn’t like going places because of it. I was floored. I am fascinated by and completely in love with the whole process. You get in a tin machine that hurtles through space, AND THEY SERVE YOU SNACKS AND BEVERAGES?! Sign. Me. Up.

*Note: the kids in the hotel room next to me are fighting. It’s 8am. The mom barely piped up once, ‘Stop it.’ She has way more tolerance than I do. Or maybe she’s had more coffee?

Back to the flying bit. I think that was when I first realized that you either have this particular affliction or you don’t. Ultimately, the travel bug is really just an urge for adventure. Well, more than an urge, it’s an insatiable craving. The more I go and do and see, the more I need to go and do and see.

I tried to figure this out while making the 10-hour drive from Orem, Utah, to Deadwood, South Dakota yesterday. Like, why do I have it but my sister doesn’t? I’m older, so maybe it was something that happened before she was born.

Or maybe it’s inherited. My dad is an adventurous soul who is suffocated by anything that tethers (aside from marriage – he’s inexplicably hanging strong in that deal, nearly 50 years in). Dad was a SoCal surfer/drag racing enthusiast/mildish hooligan as a teen, and he grew into a man who loved experiences over financial security and pushed the boundaries of lunch hour and the 40-hour work week. All of my life, he just wanted to LIVE.

So, there’s that example, which was probably something he observed a bit of, somehow, somewhere, growing up.

Who knows? All I can say for sure is that travel makes me feel something nothing else does. It makes me feel like all that stuff I worry about and obsess over daily, all of everything that seems so CRITICAL in any given moment, is really pretty tiny in the large picture.

When I was flustered over something I ‘needed’ my dad to do when I was a kid, something he was dragging his heels on – like attend a parent meeting or give me yearbook money before 3pm on Tuesday, things that seemed VITAL to me at the time – he would say, “Honey, all I gotta do is breathe.”

Technically, he was right. He always came through, through, and he for sure had his priorities straight. Breathe first. Then one thing at a time.

Traveling for me is like filling my lungs in order to awaken my mind, my heart, and my spirit.

I’m off to breathe in another day.