presents

The concept of wanderlust is simple - it is to help you cultivate your best self. It is when you return from a trip, but immediately start planning your next one. We spend seven years in Wizarding School, learning about potions and charms and transfiguration, in attempts to get us to become academically intelligent wizards and witches. Classes five days a week, cramming both useless and useful knowledge into our brains, half of which will forget the moment we take our exams. Once you realize school is out - possibly forever unless you’re attending University, you will see that there are definitive advantages to traveling when you’re seventeen or eighteen.

Number one: no commitments! While you might feel as though you have ties keeping you at home, you really don’t. Chances are good, you’re unmarried and have no kids, which means you should take advantage and see the world while you still can. It’s also a great time to engage in backpacking, while you are young and able to sleep anywhere.

Number two: travel improves your planning and navigation skills, which can only enhance your chances of finding employment when you return. It helps to engage in those from other areas, to enhance your knowledge of other cultures and become a more well-rounded individual.

Number three: Cheap locations to stay, which were made for the young and adventurous. While they might not be ideal in terms of five-star comfort, they offer local travel advice for wherever you happen to be residing. It also helps in terms of meeting new friends and like-minded individuals.

Spending my final year of wizarding school abroad in a sense only increased my urge to explore places. Which was why, after graduating and going home to America for about a month, I headed back to Europe for a backpacking adventure. While I could recommend a list of countries that I visited and enjoyed, instead I will say this: you have to find your own rhythm and just act on impulse. If something is calling for you to do it, don’t hesitate. Go climb a mountain. Go on that ten-mile hike. Sleep under the stars without a tent. Just never stop dreaming, but make sure you act on those dreams and make sure to LIVE in the present.

Travel is a unique way to bridge that gap between school and employment, to help you find your sense of self and to learn how to function on your own.