What a life of travel does to you.

A life of travel is a good thing to have. But once you start off on it, there's no looking back. What travelling does do to you is working inside of you, changing you completely as it finds a seat deep withing you. It's a parasite with a greedily voracious appetite. That bastard is hungry. Once the travel bug bites, you're afflicted for life. Once the wanderlust hits, your feet never stop being restless. It creeps into the edges of your mind. 

The temptation is always there just to take off work, drop everything, and go. And once you have a trip on the books, it's inevitable that your eyes creep toward a calendar during any spare moment and instinctually count down the days until you can flee. There's a constant itch that gets under your skin, and the only way to scratch it involves a plane (or train or bus) ticket, a backpack, and plans that don't go beyond "just get me out".

Our heroes are people like Anthony Bourdain, who makes a living (and a life) out of trekking to the furthest corners of the map. We like stumbling through sentences in foreign languages like kindergarteners. We feel proud when we can get through three weeks in Eastern Europe on a single backpack or successfully navigage through the tricky back alleys of a new city. We get thrills during the moment that a plane takes off from the runway or a bullet train pulls out of the station. We get off on eating foods that contain things we've never tried before, let alone heard of. We love filling out those "where I've been" maps and seeing just how much of the world we've covered.

One of my favourite quotes about travelling is "I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list". Iit sums up perfectly just why I love globetrotting so much. Once you start, you can never truly finish. There's always more to see, more to explore, more summits to climb, more seats to dive into, more cities to get lost in.

As scared as I am that I'll lose the means to travel, I think I know in the back of my head that I´ll never let it truly happen. Wanderlust doesn't just die from disuse or neglect. Get a camel, a hot air balloon, a pair of snowshoes, a hang glider, a sled pulled by dogs... if you want to get out, you`re getting out.