Hi, I’m Dorri, and I’m a travel-a-holic. Now I know what you’re thinking, there are worse things to be addicted to. And you’re right. I could be addicted to, let’s say, swallowing ping pong balls or listening to Christmas music in the middle of the summer. But everything about traveling enthralls me. And when I’m traveling, I’m the happiest that I ever am.
I mean, you miss some things, like cookie dough. (Damnit, Nestle, expand your market, please!) Or when you go to the airport in Norway and you order “nachos” and they give you a bag of plain chips. But nothing quite prepares you for when you go to a coffee shop in Amsterdam looking for a vanilla soy latte and instead you’re laughed at and given a contact high.
Or that time in Marrakech when people kept calling to you by yelling “Miley Cyrus” (you recently cut your hair like hers, not on purpose, I assure you), but then you got to work in a fresh juice stand for an hour because, duh, you’re a celebrity, so why not. Remember when your Italian tour guide was showing you where to have dinner, and casually says, “Oh, look to your left” and you almost collapse because there is the freaking Colosseum.
Or when you went to an absinthe bar and you ended up with the last shot of absinthe, so you got to take the beetle out of the bottle and take a picture of yourself licking it. Therefore proving to all the other customers that you are a friggin' badass.
Or when you lost yourself in the hills of Lisbon, asked for advice for authentic French food in Marseilles and somehow ended up on a date in a McDonalds. Or when you took a pill (Advil, mom) in Ibiza. Or that time, you forgot where your home was. When you decided to make your life, your adventure, your chance to see and experience the world outside the bubble that you grew up in.
What I have realized is that a travel-a-holic never crosses everything off her list. Every time I go somewhere new, I meet more people who tell me more stories of their experiences, their homes and the places they have been. At one point, I decided to make a list of all the countries that I wanted to go to during my lifetime. No joke, I googled “list of all of the countries in the world” and copied down the ones that sounded interesting to me. There are 195 countries in the world. I’ve been to 21. My list had 100 on there, plus visiting all of the continents, plus going to every state. It’s ambitious, I know. And the worst part? It keeps growing. I’ve since ripped up the list because there’s something important that I realized. Making plans is good to an extent, but with traveling there is absolutely no guarantees. No assurance that you are going to like one place and hate another, that your preconceived notions of what is going to be a decent amount of time in one place will be enough.
And there’s something else. There are so many places out there that are dangerous and scary, yes. And while I always advocate to be as safe as possible and to travel smart, we shouldn’t let the world scare us away from chasing our dreams. And if you want to travel, you should do it.
But that’s what being a travel-a-holic is all about, going everywhere you can, exploring everything that’s available to you, always having an open mind to new things. In the past year, I have gone sky-diving, jumped off of waterfalls, played with monkeys, stood on the edge of mountains. And yet, I’m not satisfied. There’s so much more out there to explore and to do. There are glaciers to climb, cultures to explore and languages to learn. There is a world out there ready for the taking. Fellow travel-a-holics, pack your bags!
For travel lovers, “seeing it all” is more of an aspiration than a reality. The Red Bulletin got real on what it’s like to have seen it all from the other side of travel. Check out the good, bad, and interesting here.
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