My life in three bags, for the next 4.5 months. A trip in the making for at least as long. I’ve printed my boarding pass. For the first time, it all feels very real. I feel light, and excited to begin my adventure. Though I will miss people and the easy comfort of home I can’t help feeling elated and a bit cathartic. Life in Northern California for the past few months has been wonderful, relaxed for the most part filled with the company of loved ones. And though I will miss waking each morning here I can’t help but notice how the everyday is beginning to blend as I cease to notice the little things, or appreciate just how beautiful it is here. Travel is so intoxicating in part because every little thing is an adventure, from the procuring of coffee to making my way through a city filled with new sights and smells. I feel deliriously alive, and when I return home it is no longer the same, but renewed as if seeing it for the first time. In this way, life is constantly full , new, exciting. Though uncomfortable and frustrating at times, it is fulfilling in a way unmatched by anything else I’ve experienced thus far. 

And because I’m a total sucker for travel quotes, I’ve been reading over some of my favorites to serve as inspiration and reassurance for the difficulty that will be saying goodbye.

Some of my favorites:

“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” – Jack Kerouac

“When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.” – D. H. Lawrence

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” – St. Augustine

“All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.” – Paul Fussell

“Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty-his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.” – Aldous Huxley

“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” – Cesare Pavese

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain

“Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” – Miriam Beard

“We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.” – Jawaharial Nehru

“To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.” – Bill Bryson

“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” – G. K. Chesterton

“Our Nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.” – Blaise Pascal

“Adventure is a path. Real adventure – self-determined, self-motivated, often risky – forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind – and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.” – Mark Jenkins