A bit of lighthearted travel inspiration for women and a perfectly good excuse to pack your bags and book a Sisterhood Travels Trip!
I want to tell you something that the glossy travel magazines will never put on their covers:
Sometimes, the reason we travel has nothing to do with a bucket list. Sometimes it has everything to do with the laundry.
Specifically: the laundry that has been sitting in the basket since Thursday. The basket that lives on the chair. The chair that has not seen its actual surface since the Bush (the FIRST Bush) administration. You know that chair. Every woman in America knows the chair.
Add to this: the grocery store. The same grocery store, on the same day, with the same list, purchased in the same order because you made the mistake once of going produce-first and it threw off the entire week. The fluorescent lights. The cart with the wobbly wheel that you always somehow get. The twelve minutes you spend in the cereal aisle reading labels you have already read forty-seven times as if something might have changed.
And then the question. Delivered every single evening with the cheerful innocence of a man who genuinely has no idea he is one “what’s for dinner?” away from being left on the side of a road:
“What’s for dinner?”
My fellow traveling ladies, isn’t it time to get out of dodge (or Gainesville)?
We have been sold a very specific story about why women should travel. It involves self-discovery. Soul-searching. Standing on a hilltop in Tuscany with your arms spread wide and a linen shirt that somehow isn’t wrinkled, looking like you have finally figured out the meaning of life.
And yes. Many times it is that. Sometimes you have a moment on a hilltop that rearranges something inside you. I’m not going to pretend those moments don’t exist, because they absolutely do, and they are magnificent.
But sometimes; and I think we need to say this out loud more often, sometimes you travel because you just need a break from your own life. From the routine that has become so grooved and predictable that you could live the entire week on autopilot and not miss a beat. From the particular, specific, soul-grinding sameness of a Tuesday that looks identical to last Tuesday and will look identical to next Tuesday until the end of recorded time.
Wanting to escape the mundane is not running away from your life. It is proof that you are still in it. Still awake, still wanting more, still the kind of woman who believes that the world is bigger than her laundry pile. (It is. Marginally, but it is.)
Here is the delicious irony of travel: you leave to escape your life, and somewhere between the airport departure lounge and your second glass of wine on the plane, something unexpected happens.
You remember who you are.
Not the you who knows which grocery store aisle the chickpeas live in. Not the you who can fold a fitted sheet with military precision (or pretends she can). The other you. The one who is genuinely, embarrassingly delighted by a menu she can’t fully read. Who will walk an extra forty minutes in the wrong direction because she spotted an interesting doorway. Who will strike up a conversation with a stranger at a market stall and end up spending the entire afternoon somewhere she never planned to be, laughing at something she couldn’t have scripted.
That woman has been in there the whole time. She just needed someone to open the door and let her out.
And the laundry? Still there when you get home. Waiting. Faithful as ever. But somehow, after ten days in a place that smelled like jasmine and espresso and old cobblestones, it bothers you approximately forty percent less. That is not nothing. That is practically a personality transformation.
I have a theory. The women who travel are more fun at dinner parties. They have better stories. They laugh more easily and worry slightly less about the things that do not actually matter, because they have been places that quietly rearranged their sense of proportion.
You cannot stand in front of something ancient and enormous — a cathedral, a mountain, a market that has been running since before your country existed — and come home genuinely worked up about the wobbly grocery cart. The world has given you some perspective, and perspective is the best souvenir.
Also sometimes you bring home cheese. Questionably large quantities of cheese. But that is between you and your carry-on.
You do not need a profound reason to travel. You do not need a life crisis or a milestone birthday or a spiritual calling. You are allowed to go simply because the alternative is another Tuesday that looks exactly like last Tuesday, and you are too alive for that.
You are allowed to go because Paris exists. You are allowed to go because a woman you haven’t met yet is going to make you laugh until your sides hurt somewhere on the other side of the world, and that woman is waiting. You are allowed to go because the laundry will absolutely, one hundred percent still be there when you return, and it will not have missed you even a little, so you may as well be somewhere magnificent in the meantime.
The most adventurous thing I know is this: a woman who decides, in the middle of an ordinary week, that she deserves an extraordinary one.
Go be that woman.
The chair will still have laundry on it. That’s what chairs are for.
Who are our Sisters? Well, we’re you! We value old friendships but love making new ones. We’re intellectually curious and love a unique adventure to parts unknown. We may be single, divorced, widowed, or simply have a partner who doesn’t want to travel. Most of all, We’re kind, compassionate women who look forward to cultural immersion, exclusive adventures, lots of laughs, and the magic of Sisterhood.
