Travel Inspiration for Writing

I’m a little bit addicted to traveling. While I tell myself that there are worse addictions, the state of the carpet in my home and the 16-year-old sandals in my closet suggest that maybe I ought to focus at least some of my attention on non-travel spending. 

The writer in me has an opinion about this travel obsession: DO IT! 

She knows that newer carpet or less worn sandals make for terrible writing (at least for me). They don’t inspire; they don’t excite. They don’t offer an opportunity for deeper connection or reflection. I will never, ever write anything about the plush nylon pile of carpet on the bottoms of my feet. 

But maybe I’ll write about all the many trips we’ve had where my middle child has thrown a fit and frowned in all the photographs which caused us nothing but grief then but make us all laugh now. 

Or I’ll write about going to the Galapagos Islands in 2022 with my daughter and becoming so seasick I wished I had the energy to throw myself over the back of the ferry and drown. 

Maybe I’ll write about my own 1993 trip to England and Ireland at 19 years old when I became engaged to someone I barely knew and what that did to my poor mother in Kentucky in the days before texting, when all we had was Par Avion to send our missives. 

I could write about coming home from a trip to Iceland in 2003 to discover I was pregnant and how songs from the album Come Away With Me playing on every restaurant sound system partly inspired my daughter’s name. 

I often think about writing about the trip I didn’t take with my parents and younger brother in 1991 when I opted to work at a grocery store rather than go to Alabama, which I have always regretted. 

During my undergraduate study, a creative writing professor told me my writing was better than my ideas, and I’ve never thought he was wrong. Even now, many years later, I don’t have a vibrant imagination well from which I dip. I envy writers who do. 

So I keep finding new places to go, new places that will help build my imagination, give me things to think about and possibly write about. Even if I never do, and those memories stay locked within me, travel still gives me greater joy than a new pair of shoes ever will.