Inspiration
“Travel is little beds and cramped bathrooms. It’s old television sets and slow Internet connections. Travel is extraordinary conversations with ordinary people. It’s waiters, gas station attendants, and housekeepers becoming the most interesting people in the world. It’s churches that are compelling enough to enter. It’s McDonald’s being a luxury. It’s the realization that you may have been born in the wrong country. Travel is a smile that leads to a conversation in broken English. It’s the epiphany that pretty girls smile the same way all over the world. Travel is tipping 10% and being embraced for it. Travel is the same white T-shirt again tomorrow. Travel is accented sex after good wine and too many unfiltered cigarettes. Travel is flowing in the back of a bus with giggly strangers. It’s a street full of bearded backpackers looking down at maps. Travel is wishing for one more bite of whatever that just was. It’s the rediscovery of walking somewhere. It’s sharing a bottle of liquor on an overnight train with a new friend. Travel is ‘Maybe I don’t have to do it that way when I get back home.”
Other Travelers
While deciding where on Earth to go we discovered a ton of travelers who helped to shape our trip. These are just a few of the many blogs that provided inspiration and got us through the work weeks. They also served as evidence for our friends and family that we weren’t completely crazy.
Quotes
“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.”
“I’m bored” is a useless thing to say. I mean, you live in a great, big, vast world that you’ve seen none percent of. Even the inside of your own mind is endless; it goes on forever, inwardly, do you understand? The fact that you’re alive is amazing, so you don’t get to say ‘I’m bored.”
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
“If it’s true that ‘good advice is worth its weight in gold’ and ‘fortune favors the bold’ then ‘listen twice before speaking once’, and ‘stay foolish’ as you grow old.’ ‘There’s no time like the present’, yet ‘the trouble is you think you have the time.’ ‘How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives’; and ‘the price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.’ Luckily ‘actions speak louder than words’ and ‘it’s better late than never’ to choose ‘the road less traveled’ or ‘go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.’ ‘You will miss 100% of the shots you don’t take’ but ‘its never too late to be what you might have been’. ‘What screws us up the most in life is the picture in our head of how it’s supposed to be;’ ‘because we become what we think about’ and ‘whether you think you can or think you can’t you’re right.’ But no worries, ‘sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.’ So ‘throw off the bowlines…Explore, Dream, Discover.’ ‘Life begins at the end of your comfort zone’ anyway and ‘it’s the journey not the arrival that matters.” You see, ‘the world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.’ No excuses my friend. ‘Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans’ and ‘the time will never be just right’ to ‘be the change you wish to see in the world.’ ‘The world is big and I want you to have a good look at it before it gets dark;’ so ‘do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”