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“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

I am among the fortunate few who have had opportunities to see the world at a young age; I have done my best to take advantage of this. Some might find Travel an unworthy or even strange section for a professionally aimed website, but I would argue that travel, when experienced the right way, alters one’s perceptions so dramatically that it should be a requirement of the education system. Mark Twain commented on the nature of travel when he described it as “fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”

I have yet to meet a person who is immune to this effect. I doubt I ever will, because being in a place forces its reality upon you. I remember the moment I felt the farthest away from home in my life. I was traveling alone, from Chiang Mai, Thailand, to Vientiane, Laos, to apply for a visa extension that would allow me to stay in Thailand longer. I had just crossed the Mekong via the Friendship Bridge and hopped a tuk tuk (think golf cart-lawnmower-carriage-taxi hybrid).

The open air setup of a tuk tuk provides a sense-awakening rush of your surroundings. The overbearing clang of the tuk tuk engine made my ears ring. The distinct smell of cow shit, a smell, being from rural Tennessee, I am familiar with, filled my nose. The warm late afternoon sun beat down on the back of my neck, its light putting on display a countryside characterized by beauty, history, bhuddism, French influence, poverty, and decades old still-active landmines notorious for stealing Laotian limbs.

As we made the 30 minute journey from the border to Vientiane and moved from 2nd to 3rd world, I sensed a kind of satisfaction only a cliche can describe – freedom. I was geographically the farthest I had ever been away from home, with no one to help me or tell me where to go, what to do. I was at the mercy of a land so different from my own, yet I thrived. I pulsed with excitement, with content, with love, with sadness, with fear,  simultaneoulsy.

It is only travel that brings these things to me in such ways. If my senses are pores then experiencing foreign worlds is wet heat. My senses are split open and colors, smells, and sounds of my location seap through the pours of perception. Like a hot tub, however, and, like an American, after so long away from home I must get out, lest I fatigue and miss the cool dryness of Bristol, TN.

Travel holds its place, still, in my heart for the knowledge it has brought me and an understanding of the unknown. Click on the “Travel” tab above to see a list of the international destinations I have experienced. Many of my blogs will contain elements from these.