Wanderlust – everyone’s claiming to be infected by the incurable disease, but how do you know if you’ve got it for sure? Here are 7 signs you haven’t traveled enough – aimed to inspire and encourage you to travel more often, to more places, and with fewer reasons holding you back.
1. You haven’t explored your own country in its entirety
You’ve heard it before – the grass isn’t always greener.
If you have a case of wanderlust but can’t currently afford a trip abroad or can’t currently take the time off work, perhaps you’ve just forgotten the obvious – to explore closer to home! A weekend road trip can often be just as adventurous and exciting as taking a two week trip to a foreign country. Just remember, everything is what you make it.
2. You haven’t been lost
If you can’t recall a time where your travel plans went astray and you found yourself completely lost on your travels, you haven’t traveled enough. Travel in its purest form is about the ups AND downs, the good AND bad, the right AND wrong. You won’t learn anything from having everything go right – be sure to take risks, go without a plan, ditch the map for a day, and just wander without intent or reason.
3. You haven’t let travel change you
When someone asks you ‘how did travel change you’, you shouldn’t be able to answer. This question should keep you talking for hours on end as your passion for travel and all you have seen, done, experienced and explored pours to the tip of your tongue like another language you speak. If you can count the way travel has changed you on your fingers, you haven’t traveled enough. Similarly if you dare answer with ‘it gave me a tan’, you need to get back out there.
4. You haven’t inspired at least one other person to travel
If you’ve traveled enough, you will be so in love with it that you inspire others around you to want to share in your passion. Even if they haven’t actually gone on a trip, your travels should inspire at least one other person to want to go out their and see the world too. This doesn’t have to be through a blog, it could be as simple as sharing travel stories and photos on your social media or day I say it, through real, live, actual photographs.
5. You don’t have a global friend group
The travelers will always have someone online to talk to at any whacky hour of the day because they’ve met so many people from so many continents that ‘it’s always 5 o clock somewhere’. If you don’t have any foreign friends, it’s time to go out there and make some.
6. You haven’t created and recreated your travel list
You know you’re suffering from a serious case of wanderlust when your hobbies include researching travel destinations and creating/recreating your travel bucketlist or list of places to visit sooner rather than later. It is perhaps ironic that the more you travel, the less you feel you have actually traveled. As you make your way around the world you will inevitably hear about new places to visit and be endlessly adding these to your list.
7. You haven’t lived in the moment completely
If you can’t recall a time in your travels where you were completely in the moment, you certainly have not traveled enough. But how do you know? If you can close your eyes and imagine the place, recall the smell, the sounds around you, the way it felt, how the wind was blowing, and so on and so forth…. then you were completely in the moment somewhere, someplace, at some time. If not – get back out there!
Brooke Saward founded World of Wanderlust as a place to share inspiration from her travels and to inspire others to see our world. She now divides her time between adventures abroad and adventures in the kitchen, with a particular weakness for French pastries.
