People travel for all sorts of reasons: to relax, to escape, to see the world. But what are we really trying to find when we squeeze all of our belongings into a standard size suitcase and take off for a far away destination?

I think that we travel to find out where we really belong. As someone who grew up in a small town and still has the same friends from high school, when you stay in one place for too long you start to feel like a bird stuck in a cage. Life is about learning and growing and creating yourself; How can you do those thing if you’ve only ever stayed in one place? What better way to learn about yourself and explore all the world has to offer other than to go out there and see if for yourself?

Travel is one of my biggest passions. I made a promise to myself at age 21 that I would visit at least one new destination per year. So far I’ve seen Bangkok, Koh Samui, Athens, Mykonos, Kusadasi, Patmos, Rhodes, Santorini, and Nafplio and I have no intention of stopping there. Every person that I have met and every experience outside of my comfort zone has made me love life and appreciate the world in a way that I could not before.

My travels started out as a way to satisfy my thirst for adventure and to learn about the world the way no text book could teach me: by throwing my whole self into new cultures and surpassing my comfort zone.

Yet, the more I travel, the more I realize that the adventure I crave can never be fully quenched because this passion has become a characteristic within myself.  Even after I see the whole world, I don’t think I could ever stop traveling.

It’s not a list of chores that you complete in order to avoid revisiting, rather it’s something you do to find your favorite places and figure out which one of them is right for you. After all, how can we truly know our place in the world if we have not seen all of it?

So, if you truly want to know who you are and what you are capable of, stop taking the world for granted and go wherever your travels may lead you, even if you end up back home at least you can say that you’ve seen it all.