If you asked me what my favorite part of traveling is, I think I'd initially say everything. The hurried walks through airports, the sound of an airplane engine roaring down the runway, the unmistakable thrill of arriving in a new city. Even the security lines I can stomach quite easily. But if I truly had to choose, I think I'd pick the way traveling turns a place into your own - no matter how many millions of people have lived there, or how history books have described it.
See, before I went to D.C., it was just D.C. to me. Our country's capital, full of politics and important buildings and monuments. But when I arrived there myself, Washington D.C. suddenly became a lot more. It became the city where I fell in love with the National Art Gallery, but also the city where I found the cutest two-story tea shop and a bookstore I always forget the name of. New York became the city where I bought a mango popsicle as I walked down Central Park on a hot August Sunday, and the place I survived wearing a thin dress and knee high boots in the cold because I just had to dress appropriately for the Met Opera in November.
Honduras makes me think of cat-sized iguanas coming across my path on the way to dinner, and Chicago reminds me of chocolate mint tea and walking too fast so I wouldn't miss anything. Kenya is me laughing so hard with my team during dinner, and the wave of nostalgia that hit me the second time we drove through those familiar, beautiful mountains. Los Angeles is picking up trash in a park while Chris Rock *allegedly* walked past us, and a random Cuban bakery that somehow became our breakfast go-to. New Mexico is the most amazing forest air, childhood pony rides and feeling like a five year old running down endless white sand dunes. And the Smoky Mountains is a bear passing by my horse on a trail ride through the woods, too much caramel fudge, and adorable, animal-shaped candles.
None of these things are what these places are necessarily known for, and yet they will always be some of the memories i treasure most about each of them. That's the thing about travel. It makes cities your own, or at least, it makes you feel like they're your own. As if places so large could somehow belong to us.
It's quite a beautiful and magical feeling that traveling gives us. This sensation that we belong to more than one place at once, or that we could, if we truly wanted to.
And this is why traveling is worth it. Not for the photos or the bragging rights. But for the unexpected memories and surprising ways in which it changes you. So find ways to do it, whatever it takes. i promise you, it is absolutely worth it.
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