Rethinking why we travel, how we do it, and integrating travel into our daily lives

If you talk to someone on the cusp of retirement, it’s more likely than not that their primary plan for their after-working years is to travel.

For most of us, travel offers us a doorway to something different.  Something new.  Something that springs from our imagination, our inspiration and disrupts the patterns and habits we follow in our daily life.

This opportunity for something new to be born from each trip and weekend getaway is the heart of wander woven travel.

It’s built from five components, which I’ll discuss here, creating a map you can use to chart your travel journey and make the most of your precious time and money. 

More than just a guide or an itinerary, wander woven travel is from a philosophy about the ultimate role of travel in our individual and collective experiences and what we draw from these connections across time and space.

What makes travel Wander Woven?

Travel is a critical activity in my life.  I thrive on the newness, the unexpected, and the unknown parts of a trip.  And through the countless hours researching, planning, and exploring I’ve come to recognize that while there is a lot of great functional travel advice out there, what we lack is a connection to the underlying reasons why we travel with our soul and our desires.

Wander Woven travel is expecting the unexpected and unlocking what we didn’t know was possible, because we have never experienced before.

The way we construct these meaningful and powerful experiences around our journeys is through five components – strategizing, discovering & exploring, connecting, restoring, and translating.

Strategizing is planning.  You’ll find countless resources, blogs, and friends who can help guide you in this process of planning.  I instead think of planning as developing an overall travel strategy that includes logistical details like where we will sleep and how we will get around to the type of experiences we want the ability to have.  We may fail at this, but with the right strategy, we give ourselves a better chance.

Discover/explore is my challenge to uncover what you didn’t know about a place.  To look around corners, and to try something different.  Whether you love lounging on the beach, hiking sturdy peaks, or something in between, there is always an endless chance to discover something.  To explore somewhere. 

There are a multitude of reasons I challenge you to approach your travel with a mindset of curiosity, openness, and bravery.

Connection is often an underlying reason behind trips.  Connecting with kids, partners, parents, friends.  Connecting with “locals”, with new cultures and traditions.  We want this desperately from our traveling companions to strengthen our relationships and share special moments with each other. 

In many ways connection is communication – something I discuss constantly at home, at work, and here, related to travel.  With stronger communication skills, we can more firmly connect and ground ourselves and our relationships to what actually matters – each other.

Restoration is a common travel goal.  But I’m convinced few people know what actually restores them.  A robust self-care industry has taught us what we think should restore us.  We’ve taught ourselves what we think restores us through repetition and experience.  But what do we actually know??  With a closer look inside, we can better align our travel with the parts of our soul that need nourishing.  And sometimes, that is far from a pool-side lounger.

Translation is the process of taking essences from our journey from our trip back into our daily lives.  How do we capture the new experiences we’ve had?  How do we share the feeling that ignited our soul while we were away with those we care about?  How do we take what we loved about our experience and use it to improve our daily, non-traveling life?

Why is the wander woven framework useful to understand traveling?

Wander woven travel is a framework that anyone can use to make their travel experiences more.  When you’re investing thousands of dollars, and precious saved up PTO, you deserve to have an incredible and life-changing experience.  Your relationships deserve the curated attention that springs from the strategizing and exploring that travel offers.

When approaching travel from this mindset you’re opening yourself up to having a full, present experience.  You worry less.  You smile more.  And you get more value for your investments.

It make be a big challenging at first, to reconceptualize the traditional trips you’ve been taking.  But I assure you – you don’t have to go far, spend a lot, or over-indulge in luxurious accommodations to have a deeply meaningful and restorative travel experience.

Wander woven travel is how.

How can we apply wander woven to our own travel?

I’ll show you!

By walking through the five components of wander woven travel, you’ll be able to craft experiences that create opportunities.  And opportunity is all you need.

If you’re looking to get started quickly and easily, start by asking yourself, What do I wish I were doing more of right now?  Today?

Jot down your answer.  Is it exercising?  Eating better?  Talking with friends?  Petting your dog?  Cooking a delicious meal?  Feeling your heart thump with adrenaline?  Sleeping?  Reading?  Listening to music as loud as you could?  Receiving inter-generational knowledge and skill?

Anything is fair game!

Now imagine you woke up in a different location from where you are right now.  You don’t know the place.  It could be rural or urban, hot or cold.  Your goal is to do what thing you wish you were doing right now.  How would you get it done?

Would you go for a walk?  Visit an animal shelter?  Grab a special coffee with a friend?  Dive into a body of crystal clear water?

These questions should bring up some ideas for where you might visit next and how you might like to spend your time while there.  Armed with a few more questions, included in another post, you can start to create a travel strategy that fits your budget, your schedule, and the innermost corners of yourself.

Wrapping Up

There are lots of ways to travel.  Lots of logistical options and infinite combinations of trips.  But to truly draw the most from your investment and capitalize on the gift that travel is, you need a philosophy, a framework, to make strategic choices to help you draw out the results you want.

To actually return to daily life refreshed.  To actually feel more connected to your partner.  To actually translate what travel felt like to friends and loved ones.

Join me.  I’ll show you how.

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Wander Woven Travel

Know where you're going, love where you've been.