confession: i hoard travel magazines

My passport is expired. I haven’t left the country in 12 years.

Yet, I have subscriptions to five different travel magazines.

A few years ago I had some extra airline miles so I cashed them in for magazines.

Travel magazines.

(This is how I get the majority of magazines that arrive at my door. If you love magazines, you should totally look into it.)

At the time I had this unspoken idea that I could transform my career and become a travel writer focusing on family travel. In the name of research, I subscribed to every travel magazine available.

Now every month they arrive mocking me and my lack of travel.

Portugal’s Best Kept Secret! South America’s Best EcoSpa’s! 42 Places to Go Right Now! The Trek of a Lifetime in New Zealand!

They taunt me as I toss them into my magazine basket. They stack up unread just to remind me of all of my unfulfilled travel dreams.

And my subscriptions never seem to expire.

I thought I would be a great traveler. I thought I would be trekking around the world dragging my kids to places we’ve never been.

It’s not that I’m afraid to take my kids places.

When they were toddlers we took them to California on a vacation. People are always amazed by the cross-country flight, the three different locations we visited, the driving Route 1, eating in great restaurants, all without smart phones. I even took them out to lunch at Chez Panisee.

Looking back that trip had its challenging moments, but it wasn’t any harder than being at home. It was just the toddler grind in a different location with my husband around to help.

A few years later we drove up the coast of Maine, exploring rocky coves, collecting shells in buckets, riding from town to town with the windows down, and no agenda other than finding the next ice cream spot.

But somehow as the kids got older, travel became harder not easier. Easier to make excuses and harder to book.

We’ve spent the last four years wrestling with the question, does it make sense to drag our kids on trips they won’t remember? Should we travel now? Or wait until later?

Now it’s later. They are old enough that they will remember, but we feel boxed in by school vacations and holiday breaks which are inconveniently the most expensive times to travel.

We talk about travel all the time. Potential trips. Places we’d love to go. The issue is, we don’t really know what we want. The world is so big and there are almost too many options. Because we don’t know what we want, we don’t plan. Because we don’t plan, we don’t save. And so we don’t travel.

We haven’t figured out how to make it a priority in our lives.

We live far from our families so our travel is often centered around visiting them. Our vacations our spent in the comfort of places we know well.

We don’t travel the way I thought we would. Not discovering, getting lost, deciphering local customs, getting way outside our comfort zones.

Because that’s really what travel is all about. Seeing the world in a bigger context. Learning how to adapt in unknown situations. Unlocking something in yourself that can’t be released at home.

I want to give that experience to our kids so I keep those travel magazines around. Hoping that one day we will be able to align all of the parts and make it happen.

I don’t want to put it off anymore. I don’t want to make excuses. I want to travel.