Travel is People

My Very First Life-Goal

When I was four years old, my mother asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I didn’t hesitate. “I want to travel the world and meet people,” I told her, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

I kinda remember saying it, but I remember what stirred it. The spark came from a children’s geography book, its pages thick and slightly glossy, the corners softened by years of eager little fingers. It was filled with photographs—not polished travel magazine spreads, but grainy snapshots of real life in faraway places. One image showed a small girl in a safron robe, her face flushed from mountain air, walking barefoot, beside her stood one goat, on a dirt trail that wound through a hillside.

The people in those photos looked nothing like me. Their clothes, their homes, their animals, their expressions—it was all foreign, and because of that, it was captivating. To a child whose only known world consisted of concrete sidewalks, vast mall parking lots, and tract homes in the sun-bleached flatness of suburban South Florida, these images were almost extraterrestrial. I had never seen mountains. Never watched fog lift off a valley. Never touched snow. And here were kids my age doing all of it like it was everyday life.

It wasn’t just that their world was different. It was that their world seemed alive. I stared at the photos and imagined myself beside them—sitting on a hillside, kicking pebbles down a dusty road, laughing without understanding the language. I didn’t want to observe them. I wanted to know them. I wanted to be there. I wanted, more than anything, to belong in that picture.

That was the moment, I think, when the seed was planted. Not just a desire to travel, but a deeper kind of yearning—a quiet, insistent pull toward the unfamiliar faces of the world. I didn’t know how. I didn’t know when. But I knew even then that staying in one place would never be enough.

A Childhood Without Departures

We didn’t travel. Not really. Our biggest adventures were the well-worn drive north to Disney World, or occasional visits to extended family in the historic—but still familiar—streets of St. Augustine. We were a family without passports, without itineraries, without foreign stamps pressed into tiny blue booklets. The closest I ever came to international exposure was riding a boat through “It’s a Small World” and visiting the country pavilions at EPCOT.

Florida was all I knew, and it was a place where the horizon was uninterrupted—flat as a countertop, stretching in every direction. The land was featureless, the weather relentless, and the rhythm of life, while comforting in its predictability, was entirely without contrast. No valleys, no peaks. No changes in elevation or perspective.

There were no mountains to hike, no snowdrifts to bury myself in, no autumns with leaves that blazed red and orange. I’d never stood in a forest so dense it swallowed sound. I had never needed a passport or packed for winter. I didn’t know the feeling of boarding a train to somewhere unknown, or the soft disorientation of jet lag.

And yet, inside me, the desire to see what was beyond Florida’s borders grew louder by the year. It wasn’t just wanderlust—it was a kind of ache. I would sit on the edge of my bed at night, flipping through outdated encyclopedias and old National Geographics from a secondhand shop, devouring stories of foreign cities and ancient cultures. I had no idea how I’d ever get there, but I knew I had to try.

At 17, I found my escape hatch. I joined the U.S. Marine Corps—not out of patriotism or family tradition, but because I saw it as a one-way ticket out of my hometown. I made one request, and one request only: send me as far from Florida as possible. I didn’t want to see the familiar in a new uniform—I wanted to be disoriented, challenged, pushed off the edge of my comfort zone.

They sent me to Japan.

It was my first time crossing an ocean. My first time seeing the curvature of the Earth out the window. My first time walking off a plane and realizing nothing looked like home. The signs were unreadable, the air smelled different, the vending machines sold things I didn’t recognize. And I was ecstatic.

That’s when my real, nomadic life began.

The World Opens

Looking back, it was the start of an addiction. But I didn’t recognize it at the time. All I knew was that something inside me had been set alight.

I spent four years stationed in Japan. It wasn’t all discipline and drill. Outside the base, I was a sponge—absorbing the rhythm of city streets, the odd beauty of konbini snacks, the harmony of language I barely spoke but loved to hear. I ended up fronting a local rock band, belting out English lyrics to sweaty crowds who screamed them right back at me. I sang backup for a Japanese pop group, my face appearing in promotional flyers that got me in quite a bit of trouble on base (I literally had to stand in front of the General and explain myself).

Then there was the Philippines—loud, sun-drenched, and chaotic in all the right ways. In Olongapo, I stumbled into a little karaoke dive called Music and Friends, and the name couldn’t have been more fitting. Night after night, over tinny backing tracks and fancy drinks, I sang my way into a circle of people who became some of the dearest friends I’ve ever known. We sang with joyful abandon, traded verses in English and Tagalog, and shared stories between songs like we had known each other forever. I even learned a handful of songs in Tagalog—lyrics that, to this day, still echo in the back of my mind.

When Mount Pinatubo began to erupt and the evacuation orders came, everyone I worked with knew exactly where to find me. We were leaving in just a few hours. That final night at the bar was blurry with music and tears. We sang until the power flickered. We hugged until the jeepneys rolled in. And for years afterward, I dreamed of being reunited with them—those voices, those faces, that little place where friendship and music stitched strangers into something like family.

Technically, I served as an intelligence sergeant in an A6 squadron, and by all accounts, I was pretty good at it. But ask me about my military service now, and the truth is—I barely remember the rank structure, the codes, the acronyms. What I remember are the street stalls, the jazz bars, the laughter, the conversations I didn’t fully understand but felt deep in my bones.

What stayed with me were the people.

Europe, At Last

By 2015, I was living in Dubai and working in the events industry—a high-octane, high-pressure world where everything, and everyone, moves fast. But as soon as the Arabian summer rolled in and the heat shut everything down from April to September, I saw an opening. A rare sliver of time. And I knew exactly what to do with it.

Europe had been calling to me since I was a kid. I had dreamed of the Highlands, of mist-laced castles and ancient cities, of moss-covered trails under storybook canopies. It wasn’t just about ticking places off a list—it was about chasing a memory I had never actually lived. A kind of imagined nostalgia. A craving for something poetic and old and foreign.

So I packed a single bag, laced up my boots, and took off. I would walk the West Highland Way across Scotland. Hike the Camino de Santiago across Spain. Ramble through the sheep-dotted hills of Wales. My plan wasn’t precise. But my longing was.

I imagined myself ambling along sun-dappled trails in the Highlands, the light shifting like silk through the trees. I breathed in that crisp, ancient European air like it was something sacred. And for a while, it was everything I hoped. Scotland was wilder and more majestic than any travel book had prepared me for. Spain offered 600 miles of the Camino—a pilgrimage lined with centuries of stone and soul. In Wales, the fog rolled in like it had its own mood, wrapping the hills in a kind of sleepy, emerald hush.

But something was off.

Somewhere along those winding trails, I began to notice what was missing. I was walking for the beauty. For the photo. For the personal satisfaction of finishing something hard and romantic. But I wasn’t connecting.

I had once dreamed of traveling the world to meet people. But now I was just moving through it—to see things, not feel them.

What I Forgot, and Remembered Again

That summer did change me—but not in the way I expected. I didn’t return home with a journal full of sightseeing highlights or a camera roll dominated by grand architecture. I came back remembering laughter. Accents. Spontaneous invitations. Kindness without reason. I went in search of landscapes and ended up rediscovering something deeper.

What stayed with me were the people.

Like the Bad Girls Club of Scotland—a group of fiercely funny, middle-aged women on their own hiking holiday. We met in a hostel on the West Highland Way. Within minutes, they’d cracked open a bottle of Malibu rum and declared I was part of the gang. They laughed like teenagers, cursed like sailors, and made me laugh until I had to excuse myself to catch my breath. That night, the bunkroom pulsed with stories and song. For a moment, it felt like I had been dropped into a Scottish version of a John Hughes movie, and I never wanted it to end.

In Spain, it was my Camino family—a ragtag band of pilgrims from a dozen different countries who, by mile 300, felt like kin. We walked together, ate together, and limped together. We shared blister tape and heartache. Every evening brought a new town, a shared meal, and deeper conversation. There were no introductions anymore—just familiarity, as if we’d always known one another, as if this trek had simply gathered us back together after lifetimes apart.

Wales gifted me quiet magic: a mother and son who invited me on a last-minute canoe ride across a glassy reservoir that shimmered like a secret. A local mayor who met me in a pub and poured his heart out about his village, speaking with the kind of pride that made me fall in love with it, too. A family who somehow discovered it was my birthday and surprised me with a homemade cake, singing me the Welsh version of “Happy Birthday” before handing me a collection of quirky souvenir gifts they’d hastily wrapped.

Those are the moments that mattered. The ones without hashtags or guidebook listings. The ones I didn’t plan for, and couldn’t replicate if I tried.

They were fleeting, unscripted, human.

And they’re the only part of that summer I still carry with me, every day.

What Travel Really Teaches You

We often say that travel is the best education, and for once, the cliché is absolutely true. But it’s not the kind of education you find in textbooks or guidebooks. Travel teaches you things in ways that are often quiet, sometimes uncomfortable, and always unforgettable.

It teaches you patience—not the kind you muster when waiting in line at the DMV, but the kind that grows from missed trains, slow ferries, language barriers, and the soft surrender to plans unraveling. You learn to let go, to float, to adapt.

It teaches humility. The world does not revolve around you—and when you’re lost in a city where you don’t speak the language, unable to read a single street sign, that truth becomes refreshingly, humblingly clear. You become a student again, reliant on gestures, kindness, and the generosity of strangers who owe you nothing but offer everything.

It teaches curiosity. You start to lean in instead of backing away. You ask questions you never would have asked back home. You notice details: the way someone wraps bread in newspaper, the sound a broom makes sweeping a stone alley, the peculiar way street dogs organize themselves in a plaza. Suddenly, the world is a puzzle you want to solve.

And most of all, it teaches empathy. You begin to see yourself in others, even those whose lives seem entirely different. You start to understand that every human being is carrying some burden, some joy, some version of love and longing. You come to realize that while the world is impossibly vast, it is also intimately connected.

You can chart a route that hits every iconic landmark. You can fill your itinerary with castles, cathedrals, waterfalls, and World Heritage Sites. But the real story—the one you’ll carry home and remember long after your souvenirs have collected dust—is written in the margins.

It’s in the broken conversation you have over tea in a roadside shack. In the unexpected kindness of someone who walks you ten blocks to your hotel instead of giving directions. In the old man who invites you to sit down, unprompted, and tells you the story of his life while you sip something you can’t identify.

It’s in the shared bottle of wine with new friends on a rooftop in Lisbon. In the way the light hit the cobblestones as you walked beside someone you’d just met. In the surprise birthday cake in a town you hadn’t planned to stop in, from people who barely knew your name but insisted you were family for the night.

Travel educates your soul. It teaches you how to be human, over and over again, in a thousand different languages.

And when you finally return home—if you ever do—you’re not the same person who left. Because every person you met, every moment you lived, every mistake and misstep and magical detour—they’re all stitched into your story now.

They’ve made you more patient. More open. More you.

And that, more than anything, is the education we need.

When I think of Spain, I remember: The ragtag group of random people I met on the Camino de Santiago. Every single photo I have of that epic journey reminds me of these dear friends… even if they are not in the photo.

It is oddly fulfilling that I finally learned to travel in a manner that I had originally set out to do as a child. “I want to travel the world and meet people.” It really all just comes down to that.

A new friendship is the best souvenir.