World travel a never-ending adventure

By Pamela Burke

“Travel is what happens when you want to experience the world.”- Anonymous
This is one of my favorite quotes about traveling. It shows that travel is more than just a list of places to go and things to take pictures of. Traveling is an experience. It is something that you will remember forever. Since I started this column last year, I’ve had a lot of questions about why I travel, what do I do when I travel, and where do I want to go.

My list of travel destinations so far, isn’t that impressive. I know a lot of people my age who have traveled more than me. In the United States, I’ve been to a variety of places ranging from Seattle, San Francisco, the Grand Canyon, Boston and Florida.

A lot of people think that traveling inside the United States is not as fun as traveling abroad; I disagree. Because you already speak the language here, it is easier to get engulfed in the culture. I went on a wine-tasting tour in a suburb of Seattle and ended up getting a private tour of the winery. I went whale-watching on the coast of California and hiked down the Grand Canyon.

The places I’ve traveled to internationally include the Caribbean, Mexico, Egypt, Germany and the Czech Republic. This summer I’ll be adding more of the Caribbean, England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and Thailand to that list. I know that this list is pretty cool, but I don’t travel just to say that I have been somewhere. I travel to learn about the culture and about the people.

In Egypt, I rode a camel to the pyramids and ate lamb (which I swore I would never try, but they told me it was beef!). In Germany, I drank hot wine on the streets with the locals at a Christmas market. In Prague, I danced to Miley Cyrus in Old Town Square on New Year’s Eve. During my cruise this summer I’ll be riding a segway and swimming with sea lions. In Ireland, I’ll learn an Irish step dance. Finally, in Thailand I’ll be riding elephants and petting tigers. See for me, traveling is not just a list of places that people insist on me going to; it’s more of an adventure to see what I can learn and experience.

The question of where do I want to go is easy: anywhere at any time. If somebody asked me to go to Uzbekistan for a week, I would probably go.

My top dream trips include a safari in Kenya, shark-diving in South Africa, an Alaskan cruise, scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef, and Antarctic cruise and Chile.

These are among the most exotic places on Earth, and I want to do some crazy things when I get there. I get a lot of funny looks when I bring up shark-diving in the most densely populated area of Great White Sharks.

I believe that travel is more than just about people, but our environment and the animals as well.

I have enjoyed writing this column because I got to spread my love of travel to the rest of Lycoming. I hope you have learned a thing or two about new places. I hope more people travel when they are in college before they get a real job. There are ways to pay for trips if you really want to go somewhere.

As Mark Twain once said, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness.”

Every time I travel, I just want to keep traveling. It is an addiction that I am proud of and never want to lose.