Let's look at why you travel and what you hope to receive from your visits. If you just want a interesting place to go, I suggest your local library. A fun place? There is always Disneyland. But, if your reasons are like mine, you want to experience a different culture and the persons that people it, you will go expecting to be changed. I am a different person after a long road trip through the Alps. I have a different understanding of the world after a sustained visit to countries in southern Africa.

    More specifically I have seen the shoes of Jews murdered on the bank of the Danube in Budapest. I have seen the hundreds of nooses in the memorial in South Africa. I walked the cemetery at the holocaust museum in Prague.  I have met a young man in Scotland that taught me about American politics. I sat chatting with a woman in Bavaria who at 101 was learning about what the Nazis were really like. I was gifted with understanding the potato famine in Ireland.

    I took a long stroll with Peter, a young man in Botswana, who wanted to learn about the United States. I drove through the back roads of Spain without much knowledge of Spanish. Well, my wife and I did it together and we learned a great deal about one another along the way. We went to be changed not to change the world.