Travel Wishlist: Thursday, 3:56pm
People often say that “travel” is a synonym for doing new and exotic things. For getting out of your comfort zone and pushing yourself hard to learn something new about our wonderful, maddening, quixotic world.
Yet people often overlook the pleasure of a return. The quest for newness can be tiring, and it can focus you on all the wrong things (checklists and photo opps for places you’ll never remember, and forgot to enjoy). Experiences don’t have to be ‘new’ in order to be fulfilling. And yet people have the hardest time going back to places they’ve been. Somehow it feels like cheating. Like defeat. Like cowardice. Like three steps backward instead of two steps forward.
It doesn’t need to be like that. In fact, we’re going to inaugurate the Travel Wishlist section of our blog with a remembrance of travels past, instead of a wishlist of travels future. Now don’t get us wrong - we want to hear all about your “must see” travel ambitions, about all the places you want to visit before you exit, stage left. About the places that give you wanderlust and obsessive travel disorders. We understand, because we’ve been there.
But take time to rekindle your travels past. Honor the places you’ve been, and tell us how they’ve changed you.
In that spirit, today’s wishlist is dedicated to the places I will take my 7-month-old son to, when he is old enough. These are places I know and love, places that I’ve been to many times, three exquisite steps backward for me, two uncharted steps forward for him.
- Vietnam - so we can sit on a street corner slurping pho
- Nepal - because I know he will find yaks to be hilarious creatures
- Istanbul - because it is simply the world’s most beguiling city
- New York City - so we can learn to hate the Yankees together
- San Francisco - because he’s an old school S.F. native
Get articles like this one delivered to your favorite RSS feed reader. Subscribe to Viator Travel Blog now.