Why I Love to Travel

by Gabby Gill

“…all good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and being deposited in the midst of terror and wonder” (147)

Growing up in a small desert town in Southern California, I hated the idea of staying in that place forever and calling it my “home”. I loved taking field trips though they were never more than 50 or 60 miles away, but the important part was that they were away. My senior year of high school all my college applications were to somewhere foreign to where I had never been before, and not a single one was in California. To be away from home, meant to be free and to figure out where I really wanted to be. Before leaving to the Emerald City, my grandparents took me on a road trip all the way to Cincinnati, Ohio. In each state, there was something different to fall in love with. New Mexico had gorgeous copper colored rock formations that mirrored the Grand Canyon. Oklahoma had friendly livestock and hot gray skies. And Ohio had gorgeous trees, rivers, and tall long-lived skyscrapers. There was always something somewhere that “home” didn’t have, which of course made falling in love with a new place easier.

To travel thousands of miles away feels dangerous and exciting like it feels to meet someone for a first date. The first steps are always the most frightening but then all of a sudden, just as the person you didn’t know as a lover becomes home, so does the place you travel to. Everyone around me either spoke French or Darija, and I was fluent in English and English only. But somehow after a few days, I was holding hands with the cities I barely knew. I could order food in a restaurant though I really had no idea what I was saying. I could greet passerby’s, though I had no idea what their extended responses meant and couldn’t translate a word past “Hello”. I was entangled and felt as though I belonged as though I had lived in Morocco for months. I often would walk down the street or in the market and be mistaken for being Moroccan because I started to blend in so well after getting the hang of my new city, just as people say the longer a couple is together the more they start to look like one another. Ask me where I want to travel to, and instantly my answer will be Morocco as if I were longing to see my far-off lover again. But who knows, after my next visit to another far off place, my answer might change as I fall in-love again and again with each new travelling journey. –by Gabby Gill