I love to travel.  Don’t you?  Seriously, in that initial moment of pre-dawn consciousness when your brain lurches clumsily into second gear (grinding inadvertently past first) don’t you love that feeling when your first waking thought is, “Oh, yeah…I’m GOING somewhere today!”

Could be someplace cool like London or LA.  Could be someplace slightly less so, like…say, Tulsa.  At some level, it doesn’t matter…cause you’re going SOMEWHERE.

For the past four years, I’ve been getting paid to travel around the world as an advisor/facilitator working with executives in communications and customer service.  For the ten years prior to that, I worked in the hotel and airline business (anyone remember Independence Air?).  So, I’ve done a LOT of traveling.  And when I’m done traveling for work, I love traveling for fun.  And therapy.

They used to say that “laughter is the best medicine” (at least in the old Reader’s Digests I remember reading in the dentist’s offices of my youth) (BTW, what am I, 80?).  But I’ve come to discover, in fact, that it’s travel that’s most capable of fixing whatever part of you that’s broken or worn out.

Here are five reasons why:

5. Air travel literally makes no sense.
If you’ve ever known anyone who works in the airline business, you know they’re a “special breed of cat.”  (Special = slighly imbalanced in some quirky yet admirable way).  There’s a reason for that. 

You’d HAVE to be nuts to think you could pack 150 people into a tin can and hurtle them through the atmosphere, only to have them arrive safely in Greenville (or is it Greensboro?)...and do it over and over again, hundreds of times a day, all across Planet Earth.  There’s no WAY that could possibly work.  Except that it does.

4. Travel is humbling.
Sorry, Walt…it’s a BIG world after all.  And we Americans often forget that we occupy exactly 4.54% of it.  Yes, this IS the greatest country in the world.  But it’s only one of many countries in the world.  I always knew that, or, thought I did…until I started to travel to places like Pretoria, Paris, and Perth.  Now I have come to see that it’s my place in the world, that’s small.  After all.

3. Travel makes you feel comfortable in places you have no business being comfortable.
I’ve walked from the CBD in Sydney (central business district) to Darling Harbour to the Opera House without even thinking about directions, or where I’m going, or that I’m even IN Australia.  OK, that doesn’t exactly make me Rand Mc-freakin’-Nally.  But to “know the lay of the land” in places that are 9,000+ miles from home is a pretty amazing feeling. 

If you’ve never experienced that, well…I never had either…until just a year or two ago. 

As such, it’s my wish for you.

2. Travel makes you appreciate being home so much more.
Second best part of the trip = going.  Best part = getting home again. 

Third best = cocktails on the third night.  Not sure why.

1. Travel activates a part of your brain that makes you feel so utterly alive.
There must be a physiological explanation.  Perhaps it’s some kind of syndrome or condition named after some 18th century Dutch or Viennese doctor.  I don’t know the name for it, but I know the sensation and the symptoms.  It’s that thing that happens when your senses are all on full alert—where you’re experiencing complete awareness of everything in your presence.  Every weirdo sign.  Every compellingly foreign smell.  Every surprisingly-not-SO-unfamiliar face.

If it’s true that most of us only use ten percent of our brains, then travel is the nudge that kicks us up to 20% (unless you’re in Vegas on your Xth complimentary cocktail, when you’re definitely in the low single digits, if that).  So, from the minute you get past the security line at Dulles, you start operating in a different/higher/more engaged mode.

Bottom line:  There’s no way to replicate that by driving down Route 7 and having lunch at Cheng’s (exotic and delightful as that may be).

HOW ABOUT YOU?  What’s your favorite part about traveling?