A thing I've thought about a lot is how the way we think about travel is misleading.

There's a cliche in the USA where college kids head off to some foreign land, read On The Road on the train, tour the ruins, have a series of intense sexual encounters with other young people in hostels, and then come back and talk about how expanded their minds have been by the experience. I don't mean to sound too contemptful of them, as I did something similar.

The thing I now think, though, is that this is really a pretty watered down way to realize the benefits they talk about. The virtues of travel, as they are usually expressed by the sort of people who usually express the sentiment, could be better realized by driving a mile or two to the wrong side of the tracks and spending an afternoon in a VFW talking to the people there and learning about their lives. Or getting a part-time job at Taco Bell. Or volunteering a couple times a week in a nursing home. The fun exotic-ness of those undertakings would be about zero. The mind-blowing coming-to-terms-with-humanity value of them would be off the charts.

Again, not disagreeing about how powerful travel can be. I'm more in a state of wonderment, and mild melancholy, that there is so much low-hanging fruit that is available to anyone, that is also unharvested.