Travel has taught me that the moments that stay with us are rarely the ones we plan for.
Before every trip, we create lists places to see, restaurants to visit, landmarks we have dreamt about standing in front of for years. We circle destinations on maps and save perfect videos to folders titled “future travel”. We imagine ourselves arriving and somehow becoming transformed simply because we made it there.
But the older I get, the more I realise that travel is rarely about the postcard moments.
It is about the feeling.
It is the strange ache of arriving somewhere unfamiliar and suddenly feeling completely alive. It is exhaustion mixed with excitement. It is conversations with people you may never see again. It is learning that a single afternoon can become part of your emotional history forever.
I have been travelling for most of my life. First with my parents as a child, later as a young solo traveller navigating the world with a backpack and a tight budget, then as a mother, a partner and someone continually searching for meaning through movement.
When I was 21, I travelled alone through Europe for months.
At the time, it felt impossibly glamorous and impossibly hard all at once.
There were overnight trains where I barely slept, cheap hostels with paper-thin walls, homesick evenings and long days dragging luggage over cobblestones in the heat. Every dollar mattered. Every decision felt important. I was constantly navigating maps, currencies, train schedules and the quiet loneliness that sometimes arrives when you are young and far from home.
And yet, I have never felt more open to the world.
I travelled from Morocco to the fjords of Norway, through cities I had read about in books and places I could barely pronounce properly at the time. I saw cathedrals, museums, coastlines and famous landmarks that I had spent years imagining.
But strangely, one of the clearest memories from that entire trip was not a famous sight at all.
It was seeing my parents in Rome after four months apart.
I can still remember the feeling before I saw them. The anticipation. The comfort. The sudden rush of familiarity in a city filled with strangers.
We sat outside eating pasta and drinking wine while Rome carried on around us in all its chaotic summer glory. Tourists moved through the streets sunburnt and excited, children ran around with melting gelato, waiters balanced impossible numbers of plates and somewhere nearby church bells rang across the afternoon heat.
Nothing extraordinary happened.
And yet it became one of the most extraordinary moments of my life.
Because travel is never really about the setting. It is about who you become within it. It is about emotion attaching itself quietly to a place until years later you can think of a city and immediately remember exactly how you felt there.
Years later, life looked very different.
I arrived in the beachside town of Mirissa Sri Lanka with my children, my partner and his children. A beautifully messy version of family life, all of us trying to find our place within each other.
I remember standing still for a moment when we arrived.
The ocean rolled endlessly onto the shore. Surfers drifted across the waves with that calm confidence they always seem to possess. Palm trees swayed overhead and beach shacks spilled with music and the smell of grilled seafood in the warm air.
And for a brief second, everything slowed. No deadlines. No responsibilities. No thoughts about what came next. Just the overwhelming feeling of being completely present.
I think that is what I search for every time I travel. Not perfection. Not luxury. Just presence.
The world has become so loud. So fast. So demanding of our attention. Yet somehow travel still offers these rare pockets of stillness where you remember what it feels like to simply exist inside a moment instead of documenting it.
A few years later, on my birthday in the Gili Islands, my partner and I swam with turtles in water so clear it almost looked unreal. The turtles moved slowly and gracefully beside us, ancient and unbothered, as though they belonged to another time entirely. Underwater, everything became quiet except for the sound of our breathing.
There is something deeply humbling about moments like that. You realise how small you are. How temporary. How beautiful it is to share space, even briefly, with a world that exists entirely outside human urgency.
I often think we spend so much of our lives rushing toward milestones that we forget to notice the moments quietly unfolding around us. Travel reminds me every single time.
Last month, we sat beside the Seine River with my partner’s son and his wife as the sun slowly disappeared over Paris.
We drank wine straight from plastic cups and watched the city move around us. Locals cycled past effortlessly. Friends gathered along the riverbank with music and food. Boats drifted slowly along the water while the sky turned shades of gold and pale pink. What struck me most was that although we did not share decades of history together, we were creating our own in that very moment. There is something quietly beautiful about the realisation that family and connection are not always built over a lifetime, sometimes they are formed through shared experiences, conversations, travel and simple evenings by a river in a foreign country.
And sitting there, listening to laughter echo along the river as daylight softened into evening, I felt something I have felt in fleeting moments all over the world.
Not the need for more photographs, more plans or more achievements. Just gratitude for being exactly where I was. I think that is why I continue to travel. Not to escape my life, but to return to it differently. More awake. More grateful. More aware of how fragile and fleeting it all really is.
Because in the end, the moments we remember most are rarely the grand ones.
They are the afternoons that caught us by surprise. The people we shared them with. The sunsets we stopped to watch. The conversations we never planned to have. The feeling of warm air on your skin in a country far from home. Travel, at its heart, is not really about seeing the world, it is about allowing the world to move something inside you.
Years from now I know none of us will remember exactly what we ate or drank but we will remember the feeling of being there together as the sky turned gold and Paris carried on around us.