"...trips challenge our preconceived notions and keep clichés at bay. They fuel inspiration. They are, I believe, what keeps us creating rather than copying." - Ed Catmull
[Note: This post has the terrifying possibility of screaming “Look at me! I’m traveling! You should be jealous!” And I want you to know that nothing is further from the intent of this post. When people are excited about something, they talk about it. We’re no different. Further, this post is simply an open expression of gratitude for the traveling we’ve been allowed to do.]
The opportunity to travel is not a right but a privilege, a wondrous blessing. It is something that we at Selladore Films have been blessed with in our short existence, and I hope we never grow callous to this blessing. If we haven’t been posting regularly as of late, we can at least partially blame it on the fact that we’ve been traveling a bit. Between the three of us, this summer alone we’ll have travelled to Colorado, upstate New York, Maine, Nova Scotia, North Carolina, Turkey, and Greece. They say to travel while you’re young, and well, we’re doing our best!
"I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list." - Susan Sontag
Travel has many wonderful byproducts too numerous to mention here. For me, the urge to get out and just move is only aggravated by the winter months that are neither welcoming, conducive to traveling, and worst of all…confines you indoors for the most of your day. (And even the days/hours you spend outdoors become the exception, not the norm.) But I’m not suggesting that I enjoy traveling because it’s movement for the sake of motion. Instead, travel offers an opportunity to see, experience, and learn new things. Like seeing a baby moose, or whales off the coast of Nova Scotia, or breathing in the thin air at more than 11,000ft in elevation. And that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface. When we travel we learn and experience new things and this changes us. Being changed, we return, seeing everything just a little bit different because of our travels. Whether they are cultural conventions we take for granted, a new definition for what you consider “high altitude”, or simply the appreciation of a hot shower. Travel teaches us, changes us.
However, I think the best part of travel is that you can share the experience. Yeah, we take photos and video on our travels, but that’s only an extension of what I mean. I mean traveling with real people. There’s no substitute for travel, and there’s nothing like doing it with people you care about. A lot of travel has to be done alone, but for me, I want to share the experience with people that will remain in my life beyond just the duration of travel. You come back and later you say to those people, “Remember that one time we didn’t shower for 4 days?” or “Remember when we hiked in 3+ feet of snow on Memorial Day weekend?” Your shared experience transcends words because they knew how it felt, they were there. Every wrong-turn, every discomfort, every misery, and every nigh-calamity that occurred is now somehow humorous, if not more memorable for it. In this way, travel transforms even the “bad times” into good times. Because when you’re traveling with people you care about, how bad can things be?