Travel Taught Me

I was looking through some of my scrapbooks this evening, and I came across this list on the last page of my Europe albums. When my husband and I lived in Germany, we traveled somewhere in Europe at least once a month and that experience taught me so much about the world and about myself.

These are the things that travel taught me...

• you will never be satisfied until you’ve seen the whole world – and even then you’ll want to go back and do it again.


• you learn more traveling than you do in school.


• no matter how homesick you get, you’ll never believe how much you miss it once you get home.


• that memories are more important than souvenirs.


• sometimes getting lost is half the fun.


• not everyone who offers to help you is a potential shady character – sometimes they just want to be nice.


• staying in small family-run hotels and B&Bs adds much more to the experience than staying in chain hotels.


• not to look for home in the places you visit, but instead seek out the things that make it unique and different from your own culture.


• not to eat chain food – you can do that at home! Seek out little family-run places that allow for new and different culinary experiences.


• you often remember more of the good times than the bad ones, and when you think of the bad times, you can usually laugh about them now that they’re in the past.


• getting up early to be the only ones walking around St. Peter’s Square is worth way more than sleeping in.


• that deep down inside, I just might actually be a city-girl


• sometimes taking the road less traveled makes all the difference and sometimes it doesn't


• that “broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” – Mark Twain