Travelling the world, that’s living the dream.  The path to infinite happiness.  Or is it?  This is the truth about long term travel addiction.

What we don’t tell you about our glorious life on the road is how much we hate it at times.  About all the days we want to pack it all in, grab the backpack and run all the way home.

Travelling long term is hard.  Not only physically; traversing glaciers and 14 hour bus journeys but also on the mind.  It is a constant tug of war going from moments of pure elation reaching life long dreams, to rock bottom rubbing your last two cents together.  It is an addiction.  The constant search for doing something bigger, better and braver.   The kind where you see things you have never seen before, done things you never even dreamt of doing.  I can talk to you all day about why I love travelling.  But ask me if I hate it and I will deny it.  That’s a traveller secret we don’t let out, it’s traveller’s code.

But of course to match these immense moments of happiness there are crashing lows.  I have cried more times than I care to mention over the past year and a half.  There is that constant nagging in your head about whether you’ve made the right decision.  If you took the right turn. I miss my friends and family every day.  My friends are getting engaged and having babies and I am missing out on sharing their joy.  Friends forget to tell you important news or worse of all, forget you altogether.  Grandparents are getting older and we are missing out on spending those precious moments with them.

Travel | An addiction you’ll never want to stop.

And the hardest part of all … actually going home.  Cold turkey.  Signalling the end of the adventure.  It fills me with dread having been through it before.  After you arrive back home and the excitement dies down and you realise nothing has changed.  Where life has gone on perfectly well without you, and biggest of all, where it is ‘normal’ to do the same thing every single day when you know there is a big world waiting for you out there.  That is why we do it.  For this reason alone is worth the moments of hardship.

What did you think of my take on travel addiction? Are you a travel addict too? If you enjoyed this post or found it helpful, please comment below.