A nomad for the better part of the past five years, I sought to answer the question of "Why I travel?" in a notebook from the window seat of a Boeing 737 last December.

Late one night, I recorded that answer.

While I am no videographer and the majority of my moments go intentionally uncaptured, I did have enough footage from five years of travel to span four minutes. Backed by M83's Outro, this is the "why" behind my last five years of venturing out.

In the United States, road trips are almost a rite of passage — our ultimate symbol of escape, freedom, and adventure. From the written works of Kerouac and Steinbeck to a laundry list of films that take place on the open road (from Little Miss Sunshine to Into the Wild to Rain Man), we’ve culturally come to recognize the road trip as the antidote to too much city, sameness, and domestic life.

After personally crisscrossing the American west more than half a dozen times by car, driving the entire west coast, and spending more than five months of 2018 living out of a Honda Element converted into a home on wheels, a sharing of my take on the art of the 21st century road trip has felt long overdue.

However, it wasn't until I conducted a bit of “road trip” keyword research, that I found the fire to pen this piece.

Why?

I discovered that the most searched keyword associated with “road trip” is “planner.”

Today I’m releasing Man Bites Dog! a downloadable PDF guide to raising a ridiculous amount of money for charity through creative endeavor.

Over the summers of 2013 and 2014, I raised over $100,000 for charity with two attention-demanding, audacious undertakings. First, my brother and I pedaled bicycles 4,450 miles across the USA for the children's hospital that saved my life. The following summer, I backpacked 200+ miles through the Sierra Nevada mountains to “summit” both type-1-diabetes and the highest mountain in the contiguous United States with my younger sister.

Mostly thanks to an article on Bicycle Touring Pro, I've been privately advising others on the process since. Two years ago, I thought it worthwhile to write down my formula to distribute on a larger scale. After picking up and putting down the project a couple of times, reworking the structure, and putting more time into these fifty-six pages than I’d like to admit, and it’s finally finished!

“To travel or not to travel?” is the most common question I receive as a writer of wanderings and thrifty travels.

Whether the aim is a specific place (especially Hawaii and New Zealand), a specific way (by bicycle or in a Honda Element home on wheels), a specific job (deckhand for American Cruise Lines, season work through CoolWorks), or a general inquiry about whether to travel or not, I answer this question in one form or another dozens of times each year.

A couple months ago, I received a general ask of the “to travel or not to travel?” question and figured I’d publish my response, highlighting my approach to the question and offering a bit of insight into why I venture out.

This year was a year of discovery and evolution for me.

From life lived from a Honda Element to five months in the mountains just outside Yellowstone National Park to discovering the inner half of the human experience in a ten-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat, the lens through which I view the world was reshaped more in the past year than any year since a stroke quaked the core of my being at sixteen.

Perhaps the most important lesson from all this change was that we will continue to be shaped and reshaped as long as we remain open to the world. An unchanging worldview is not a sign that we've got it all right, but that we lack exposure to new experiences or are blind to what those experiences teach.

A highlight reel of WONDER WANDER 2018, by Christopher Bellizzi.

From September 21st to 25th I hosted WONDER WANDER 2018, a gathering of adventurous and creative souls at The Range Rider's Lodge—the stunning, old log-cabin lodge I run in the summertime a mile outside Yellowstone National Park.

Ten hours a day for ten days straight, I sat meditating (or attempting to at least). Not to short-change past endeavors, like recovering from a brain-damaging stroke or pedaling a bicycle across the United States, but it might have been the most intense, challenging experience of my life to date. It was also one of the best.

What follows is part story, part review: why I signed up, my experience, and why I believe that—if one can handle it—a ten-day Vipassana meditation course is one of the best experiences a human can have.

From September 21st to 25th I hosted WONDER WANDER 2018, a gathering of adventurous and creative humans at The Range Rider's Lodge—the stunning, old log-cabin lodge I run in the summertime a mile outside Yellowstone National Park.

Never have I hosted such an event before, I had no notions of how it would turn out or who would turn up. What transpired was different, and better, than I ever imagined.