Travel's Sadistic Allure

Because travel is our passion, we are adding a new category for our blog posts, "Motivation," dedicated to travel quotes to help ignite your travel flame and get you motivated to book your next trip! Watch for a new one (almost) every Monday!

Cesare Pavese - "Travel is a brutality."

I may have mentioned this before, but it bears repeating - we LOVE to travel! But, as Cesare Pavese says, "Traveling is a brutality." We have dealt with lost luggage, missed connections, buses running late, food poisoning, sweltering heat, excessive dust, cold and flu bugs, and some less-than-desirable neighborhoods. We've been cursed at by drunk homeless men and flipped off for taking pictures of buildings.

But we have also followed a Native Indian of Panama through the jungle to meet his wife and daughters and buy their hand-carved figurines; stumbled onto a plethora of murals and other street art in Havana; popped into Mom-and-Pop restaurants in Beijing, where we have discovered some of the best Chinese food we had ever had before; used hand signals and smiles to get directions from a local in Dubai; and had long, meaningful conversations with complete strangers in Belize.

The uneasy, disoriented feeling, the vulnerability of being somewhere completely foreign, and the knowledge that no matter which way we turn, we will see something we've never seen before, is a large part of the allure of travel. On our first day in each city we visit, we spend the day wandering the streets with no destination in mind, just to get a feel for the city and to see what we see.

As uncomfortable and even brutal as it can be, navigating the unknown will forever be the siren that calls to us, drawing us ever onward.