It’s rare that I meet somebody who doesn’t love to travel, or at least has a burning desire to do so. Occasionally though, people will find themselves with a lack of motivation to travel or maybe even feeling a bit burnt out.
As somebody who used to travel frequently for business, I’ve been there. In fact, when my work became steady and I stopped traveling for business, I didn’t go anywhere for three years. I didn’t even use my vacation time from work. Talk about a waste.
Here’s a few ways you can get back into the travel mood and catch the burning desire to venture out into the world:
Watch a good movie
Spend the night in and rent a good foreign film that will make you yearn to learn a language and experience life in another place.
Sidenote: I’ve watched Amelie about 50 times in order to practice my French.
Suggestions:
Read a book
Much like a good film, a great book can transplant you to another place and immerse you in a culture you might otherwise have no familiarity with. Most people can’t get through a book in an evening, but spending a few days or weeks (months in my case) is a great way to encourage you seek fun or adventure elsewhere in the world.
Suggestions:
Eat at a foreign restaurant
Bonus points if you’ve never tried that type of food before.
And guess what: chances are the food where you are going is probably considerably better than the local restaurant, regardless of it’s authenticity. For example, there is a great Moroccan restaurant in town but their best meal doesn’t compare to the worst meal I had in Morocco.
Break up with your significant other
OK, I’d never encourage anybody to DO this so you can go travel, but if this unfortunate event occurs, why not get over someone by taking an impromptu trip to Europe or somewhere where you can get your mind off of that heartbreak (or in some cases, relief)?
It’s surprising how many people I’ve talked to who’s travel bug caught them after they ran off for a month following a breakup. Seems about as good of an excuse as any to me!
Work too much overtime
Here’s an easy one. Work too much and I can almost guarantee you’ll quickly have a dying urge to hop aboard a plane and run away for a few weeks.
I’m going on 45-straight days of work (the joys of having a day-job AND running your own business) so you can bet I’m ready for my next trip. July can’t come fast enough!
How do you get motivated to travel? Does it come naturally or do you need some outside encouragement?
Headline image courtesy of freefotouk
A big one for me, read travel blogs and join online travel communities. Seeing, reading and hearing about where other people have traveled to always makes me want to get out and explore.
Plan a hypothetical trip. My friend is moving to Vancouver this summer, and already we’ve been flirting with the idea of a roadtrip from her place to San Francisco. It probably won’t happen for another year or so. But the idea of it is already exciting.
An obvious (but great) one I didn’t think about Alouise!
Having lived in So Cal & Vancouver (making the drive once from So Cal & multiple times from Seattle) I’d highly recommend the road trip!
Good article! I’m finding myself if need of a bit of motivation. After a round the world year in 2009 I’m back at work trying to pay off the credit card and save up for the next trip, but it’s very easy to become complacent and fall back into every day life, neglecting my savings and travel plans. I think I might watch Amelie tomorrow to get back in the mood.
My husband and I love to travel and try to take at least a couple international trips a year. Our two most recent big trips (Eastern Caribbean in March 2010 & India in November 2009) were exciting, but there was one thing that we found more challenging than packing or getting a dog sitter; that was going through guidebooks and travel sites to figure out which tourist attractions were the most interesting, where to eat, where the best beaches were, etc. It gets tiring pouring through guidebooks and can make the trip seem like a bit of a chore.
In the case of our India trip, we opted to use a travel company and booked a private tour in Northern India. That solved some of our problems, but we still had issues such as not knowing where to eat, suspecting our travel company had an arrangement with certain restaurants to take their clients there. Also, we were very frustrated by not knowing when we were being not just overcharged but grossly taken advantage of, cheated. Our various guides kept taking us to these tourist-only stores from which they got a commission for any of our purchases.
Recently I came across a travel site called Tripping which connects site members to hosts around the world. I think that using such a site for our next trip to an exotic country, maybe just connecting with a local to get the lay of the land over a cup of coffee ,could help ease some of the anxiety over the unknown. I realize that the unknown is half the fun of travel, but I do like to have some definite guideposts to make sure I get the most out of the trip.
i dont need any more motivation other than you saying… “will you be my travel partner forever” “will you also couch surf and watch sitcoms with me” ” will you spend forever with me” that’d be good. love you
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