I was recently thinking about what inspired me to want to go on the upcoming trip. The answer to this question is honestly a ton of different reasons, but there are a couple of inspirational moments that really stand out.

My friend Morgan moved to South America for a year a while back. I visited him for 10 days and had a blast. As we traveled, we met a lot of people from all over the world. The common conversation between travelers in these situations is: Where have you been? Where are you going? and How long are you going for? Almost everyone I talked with was traveling for at least 6 months, but most a year and some even longer. When I explained my 10-day vacation, the typical response was, “such an American holiday” (in reality, maybe one person said that — but it stuck with me). At this point I realized I was doing something wrong. As I flew back from South America, last March, it was then that I decided to travel for a year. However, I had never imagined it would be this soon.

My other inspirational moment comes courtesy of Pixar’s recent movie, “Up”. For those who haven’t seen it (I don’t recommend it), the movie is about a married couple who were friends since childhood. They’ve always had a dream to travel to a faraway island and so begin to save money to do so. But, as they say, life kept getting in their way; their car breaks down, their roof needs patching, etc. Unfortunately the wife passes away, and they never get to fulfill their dream together. The husband decides it’s been long enough and decides that it’s finally time and so he goes. This all happens in about a 5-minute montage scene that even brought ME close to tears.

While this is obviously a pretty extreme example, it still really hit home. It’s so easy to put something like this off and make excuses. The hard part about these excuses is that most of them are probably valid and not really even cop-outs.

There are many things that are seemingly lining up for us and are enabling the trip, but I think that’s reverse thinking. I think it’s primarily because we’ve decided to make the trip happen that things are lining up for us.

Here’s a link to the montage scene from Up (4:00 minutes long).

Filed under: Pre-Trip