"What motivates you to travel?"
If I had a dollar for every time that question was asked of me, it might just be enough to cover my next airfare.
Traveling takes time and costs money. So why do it? Different people travel for different reasons, which may further change depending on life events preceding a given trip. Some travel to satiate their need for novel experiences and break away from the comfort zones of daily life. In its simplest form, a vacation. Others travel with more specific goals in mind - fulfilling fantasies of seeing particular historical or natural wonders, studying and engaging with members from cultures of personal interest, or testing physical endurance through recreation in exotic locales and extreme conditions. These are but a mere fraction of the countless justifications people might have. And even then, there are still those who travel only to check destinations off and be able to say, "I've been there... Why?... Because I can.". While everyone is entitled to their own motives and opinions about what makes their form of travel "legitimate", I hold two things to be universal - unless it's illegal, there are no wrong reasons for travel and no wrong methods of how one does it.
My motivations for travel are somewhat complex. While each of my trips has had its own individual goals, I've always sought to view my travels from a different perspective as something grander in scale - an endless journey. Emulating the mass migrations of humanity over the course of millennia, each trip I take is no longer viewed as an isolated experience, but rather one additional step in my constant movement towards acquiring a greater understanding of our world and who I am - who we are - as its primary inhabitants. Through ethno-linguistic relations, historical trade routes, and the evolving features of Earth's terrain, my journey has taken me from areas right in my own backyard across multiple continents, from infancy to adulthood.
