I make a game of it every time I travel somewhere. Before I arrive, I form a picture in my mind of what the place will be like. The scale of it. The smell of it. The distances between things. The food. The people. The particular quality of light or sound or pace that I have absorbed from photographs and descriptions and other people’s accounts. 

And then I get there. And I notice, with genuine delight, everything I got wrong.

Pompeii was so much larger than I had imagined. Turkey smelled and tasted like nothing I had expected. The Western Wall in Jerusalem produced an emotional response I had not anticipated and could not have predicted. The DC Metro, which I had dreaded based entirely on television representations of a different subway system, turned out to be clean, efficient, and nothing like the picture I had been carrying.

Scotland and Ireland really are that green. Not postcard green. Genuinely, almost aggressively green in a way that makes you understand why people become poets about those places. Wyoming surprised me in a completely different direction. I had no idea how windy it gets there. They have actual road gates they deploy as barricades across the freeway when conditions become too dangerous to drive. I did not know that was a thing. It is a thing.

In Italy, I spent several confused days in lines before I understood that Italians stand considerably closer to each other than I was accustomed to. Not rudely. Just differently. My understanding of personal space had not traveled with me. And then there was the Vatican and Sistine Chapel. We had been warned multiple times about pickpockets. Repeatedly, by multiple people. I was prepared. I was vigilant. The warnings were entirely warranted.

Most people find this expectations habit odd. I find it one of the most useful things I do.

Because travel, at its best, is a systematic dismantling of assumption. It puts your existing picture of the world in direct contact with the world itself. And the gap between what you expected and what you find is where the real learning lives. The places that are bigger than you imagined. The ones that are smaller. The food that surprises you. The distances that defy your mental map. The people who are warmer, or cultures more complicated, or traditions more similar to yours than you expected.

This is not a minor benefit of travel. It is, I would argue, the most significant one. And it is available to anyone willing to pay attention.

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Travel Tests What You Think You Know

The formal name for what I am describing is something close to what researchers call schema updating. It is the process of revising your mental model of something when new information contradicts it. Most of us do this reluctantly in ordinary life, because our existing models feel like knowledge and revising them feels like admitting we were somehow wrong.

Travel makes it feel like a game instead of being wrong.

When you are standing somewhere you have never been, there is no ego investment in having been right about what it would be like. You are free to be surprised, to notice, to update. And to enjoy the process of discovering how much your imagination had gotten wrong and how much richer the reality is than the picture you brought with you.

This habit of noticing the gap between expectation and reality is one I have applied well beyond travel. It is, in a meaningful way, the foundation of how I think about assumptions in relationships, in communication, in every area where we tend to act on the map rather than checking it against the territory.

Travel has taught me to check my assumptions and expectations.

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Shared Experience Builds Something That Time Alone Cannot

Some of my husband’s and my most enduring memories, the ones that resurface in ordinary moments years later, are from traveling together and creating a shared history. The bus driver in California who kept saying “I’m on a roll!” that our whole family still quotes when we think we’re being funny. The warmed hummus we enjoyed in Turkey. The first time we saw Yellowstone. Standing at the Western Wall together.

These shared experiences do something that shared routine cannot. They create a particular kind of memory. A vivid, emotionally charged, located in a specific place and moment memory that becomes part of the shorthand of a relationship. The insider reference. The story that still makes you laugh. The moment of shared awe that deepened something between you. Watching a sunrise over Half dome in Yosemite did this.

This applies beyond romantic partnerships. The trip taken with a close friend. The family vacation that produced the story everyone still tells at gatherings. The travel companion you learned something significant about because being away from ordinary life revealed something that ordinary life had kept covered. That is shared history.

On a cruise with extended family, Joel stopped to photograph the boat schematics posted on the wall near our excursion meeting point. A staff member rushed over, alarmed and said “you cannot take a picture of that.” We still say it. Any time someone photographs something mildly questionable, someone in the family says it. That is what shared travel produces. Language. Shorthand. The reference that makes everyone who knows laugh and confuses everyone else.

My husband, Joel, and a cousin once spent an afternoon on a shore excursion and came back with a bottle of mead. We never opened it. It has now become a running tradition, spanning years. Whoever had it last sneaks it into a hiding spot at the other person’s house, like a secret agent completing a mission. The bottle travels more than we do some years. It is ridiculous, funny, sparks curiosity and it is one of my favorite family traditions.

A camping trip with family produced pinecakes. Pancakes, except pine needles had gotten into the batter somewhere along the way. They are now formally known as pinecakes. They will forever be pinecakes in our group because shared history dictates that it does. The ornament I brought home from a girls trip sits on our Christmas tree every year. The girlfriend day trip we all accidentally wore purple shirts. Now whenever we travel together we all wear purples in some way. It might be erring, a shirt, pants, socks or hair tie. You can bet purple will be represented when we get together. And then there is Shawna. If there is something you want to see when traveling, she will make it happen, up to and including three taxis in a foreign country to get there. 

These are not grand memories. They are the exact right kind.

And sometimes the memory originates from someone you will never see again.

The taxi driver in Ireland who told us his daughter was studying at a college in Boston. Then paused, perfectly, before delivering the punchline with impeccable timing: wait, wait for it… she is studying European history. We still say it in his Irish accent and perfect cadence. It has been years. An inside joke from a simple twenty-minute ride with a stranger still lives. 

The taxi driver in Rome who told us he learned English by listening to Bob Dylan. Then the song Born to Be Wild came on the radio during the drive. He told us, cheerfully and non-negotiably, that nobody was getting out of that car until we all sang the chorus with him. We sang the chorus. All four of us. We got out laughing.

These people did not know they were giving us anything lasting. They were just being themselves. Generous, funny, fully present in the moment. Just writing that mad me smile. That is the other thing travel teaches you about people: most of them, in most places, are well-meaning and worth knowing. Even briefly. Even in a taxi. Even for exactly one verse and chorus of Born to Be Wild.

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You Learn Things About Yourself and Others That Home Cannot Teach You

There is a version of yourself that only appears under novel conditions. The traveler who handles a missed connection with humor. The one who freezes when plans fall apart. The one who turns out to be more adventurous than they knew, or more in need of comfort than they expected.

Joel is more easygoing in travel disruptions than I am. I get more stressed when plans go sideways, and I know this about myself because travel has shown it to me repeatedly. That self-knowledge is useful. Not just on the road but in how I plan, how I prepare, and how I communicate about my needs in any high-stakes or uncertain situation. Worth mentioning: I travel frequently for speaking engagements and workshops. So missed connections, delays and cancelled flights carry real professional stakes for me. Which helps explains why they elevate my stress level more than Joel’s.

Traveling with people you care about teaches you the same things about them. How they handle uncertainty or sickness. What they find delightful. What exhausts them. What brings out their best and what reveals their edges. You become, over time, an expert in each other in a way that shared routine cannot produce. Because routine reveals the predictable self, and travel reveals the adaptive one.

On a girls trip, my friend was so nervous about a tram ride that I sang the entire way up to distract her.  I learned something about her that day. Not a flaw. A fact. A real fact about who she is and what she needs. And she learned something about me too. That, although I am not a great singer, I will absolutely sing on a tram in public if that is what the moment requires. This same friend once got an entire light rail car of people to sing happy birthday to me when we were traveling for business on my birthday. These are the things you know about a person after you have traveled with them. The things that make you genuinely valuable to each other.

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Movement and Physical Engagement Restore Something

Travel tends to make us more physically active than ordinary life does. Not because we plan it that way, but because navigating new places requires it. Walking through cities. Hiking trails that are too good to skip. Biking along coastlines. Climbing things to see what is on the other side.

The research on movement and wellbeing is consistent and significant. Physical activity, particularly the kind that happens outdoors, in varied environments, at a pace that is exploratory rather than performative, produces measurable benefits for mood, cognitive function, and stress regulation. The body that has been moving through new terrain tends to sleep better, think more clearly, and feel more alive than the one that has been sitting in familiar rooms.

This is one of the underappreciated gifts of travel. Not the dramatic adventure. Though that is good too. But the daily accumulation of movement that happens simply because you are somewhere new and want to see more of it.

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Travel Recalibrates What You Think Is Normal

Every place you visit has its own version of ordinary. It’s own pace. Its own relationship to time. Its own understanding of what a meal is or what a community looks like or how people greet each other. Encountering these different versions of normal, really encountering them, not just observing them from a tourist distance, does something important to your sense of what is fixed and what is chosen.

Most of what we take for granted as simply the way things are, turns out, on closer inspection, to be just one of many possible ways things could be. The country where the workday ends at a different hour and dinner happens later and the streets fill with people in the evening does not have it wrong. They have it differently. And seeing that difference and really letting it land, tends to loosen the grip of assumption in every direction.

This is why I find travel genuinely useful, rather than simply enjoyable. It is not just a break from ordinary life. It is a cure for it. A regular reminder that the picture you have been carrying of how things are and how people are and what is possible is probably narrower than the world it is meant to represent.

The gap between your picture and the reality is not an embarrassment. It is an invitation.

Notice it. Enjoy it. Update the picture. And go somewhere new again soon enough that the updating stays a habit.

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Mementos and Memories Matter

One more thing worth saying before we close.

The Christmas ornament from that girls trip. The pinecakes that will never be called pancakes again. The unopened bottle of mead making its annual covert journey between households. The photograph Joel’s the staff tried to prevent. The purple shirts.

These are not souvenirs in the gift shop sense. They are artifacts of a specific moment shared with specific people. And they do something that photographs alone cannot do. They pull the memory forward into the present. They make the past available in the ordinary moment. They give you something to hold that says this happened, we were there, and it mattered.

Collect them deliberately. The small thing from the market. The ticket stub. The impractical object that made everyone laugh. The tradition that started accidentally and became the thing you always do now.

Mementos matter because memories matter. And memories matter because they are, in large part, what relationships are made of.

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You Do Not Need the Taj Mahal to Travel

I want to be honest about access and scale, because travel is sometimes presented as though it requires international destinations and unlimited budgets.

It does not. It most certainly does not. 

The principles are challenging expectations and perception testing. The shared experience, the self-knowledge, the physical engagement, the encounter with different versions of normal are available in a drive to a town you have never visited. A camping trip to a state park. A weekend in a city you have always meant to explore. A day trip somewhere that is not your ordinary somewhere. Even a city I have visited before for a talk or workshop offers something new. Maybe it’s a different season, a different room, a different audience, or the particular detail I missed the last time I was there.

The distance matters less than the intention. The intention to pay attention. To notice what you got wrong. To notice what was different. And to be present for what the place actually is rather than what you expected it or somehow wanted it to be.

Start where you are.
Go a little further than usual.
Notice everything.
Appreciate it all.