If I had unlimited time and money, I would spend my life traveling the world. I would visit every historical monument, every beautiful landscape, every city, and every quiet place hidden in between. More than anything, though, I would want to experience the everyday lives of people completely different from myself.
Sometimes I’ll be driving through my small town and pass someone I’ve never seen before, and a strange thought will hit me: Is this the first and last time I’ll ever see this person? My town only has around 12,000 people, yet I still constantly encounter strangers. It makes me wonder how many people I’ve actually seen here, even once. Then my mind naturally expands the scale outward. What about my county? My state? The country? The world?
There are over eight billion people alive right now.
That number almost stops feeling real when you try to comprehend it. The largest city in my state doesn’t even have one million people in it, yet the world contains billions upon billions of lives unfolding at the exact same time. It makes you realize how small you really are. Just one person in an ocean of others.
But within that ocean exist millions of stories, interactions, traditions, and experiences waiting to be discovered. To me, that is what travel is truly about.
What fascinates me most about traveling isn’t luxury or escape. It’s culture. It’s seeing how differently people live while still remaining fundamentally human. Every place develops its own traditions, social norms, foods, languages, routines, and ways of understanding the world. Things we see as completely normal in our daily lives may not even exist somewhere else. Once you really think about it, that realization becomes endlessly fascinating.
Culture feels almost like living history. Some traditions have survived for hundreds or even thousands of years and still continue today, passed down through generations of people who will never meet the ones who started them. You can learn about cultures through books, videos, documentaries, or online discussions, but there always seems to be something missing from secondhand understanding.
Experience.
Actually being somewhere changes your perspective in a way that information alone never fully can.
Language is another part of travel that deeply interests me. Recently I’ve found myself falling into rabbit holes about linguistics and writing systems. The idea that language is essentially a shared understanding of sounds feels strange and beautiful to me. Neighboring countries can sometimes understand each other easily, while others develop languages that sound entirely unrelated despite being geographically close.
Even writing systems themselves fascinate me. Some alphabets are linear and nonfeatural, where the symbols give little indication of how sounds are physically formed. Others are featural systems, where the shapes themselves contain phonetic meaning. Then there are logographic systems, where symbols represent entire words or ideas rather than individual sounds. The deeper I look into language, the more it feels like another lens into understanding how different groups of people interpret the world around them.
And honestly, that only makes traveling feel even more exciting to me.
My actual travel résumé isn’t particularly impressive yet, though I’m slowly building it. Money has definitely been the biggest limitation. Still, I’ve managed to travel solo to quite a few places, and doing that taught me a lot about myself. At the same time, after experiencing both solo and group travel, I think there’s something uniquely special about exploring places with other people who share that same curiosity about the world.
So far I’ve been to thirteen states, though I would only consider six of them truly “visited,” since the others deserve more exploration than I gave them. I’ve also visited two countries so far. After this summer, those numbers should increase to fifteen states, eight genuinely explored states, and three countries.
There are still so many places I want to see. New England is high on my list, along with many places throughout Europe and Asia. Though admittedly, I’ve realized I don’t really connect with extremely hot climates very well. Cooler weather and older places tend to draw me in more.
I think this section of the blog will mostly become a collection of experiences, thoughts about places I’ve visited, cultures I’ve encountered, and destinations I hope to someday reach. Because to me, travel has never just been about seeing places. It’s about understanding how unbelievably vast the world really is, while somehow still finding pieces of yourself within it.