The Pleasures and Challenges of Long-Term Travel

Shameless self-promotion: A story I wrote about my five-month trip to Asia appeared in Sunday’s Minneapolis Star Tribune. Why did I go? “Nearly a decade earlier in Europe, I’d fallen in love with long-term travel. Two years out of college, I had quit my job, bought a couple of rail passes and spent five months backpacking my savings away, from Istanbul, Turkey, to Belfast, Northern Ireland. The journey was a revelation. With so much time, my entire approach to travel changed. Instead of rushing from one landmark to the next, as I’d once done on a three-week trip to Europe, I improvised my way across the continent like a street-corner jazz saxophonist riffing through a standard, adhering to only the most basic framework, digressing often.”

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