By Rachel Garvey
As students, we are learning more and more about the world we live in everyday through our chosen subjects. These chosen subjects give us the inspiration to go out and travel around the world, to discover hidden adventures around every new corner. Travelling alone or with friends can give you the confidence to step out of your comfort zone and experience things which you thought were scary but turned out to be quite enjoyable.
I was terrified to travel to Dublin alone the first time I visited my boyfriend. The thought of travelling alone made me anxious, and Dublin always had unexpected surprises around every corner. The crowds and the people who always tried to ask you for something were two of the many things I wanted to avoid. I soon became accustomed to it all after nearly three years of travelling there. I gained confidence to face the crowds, they no longer made me coil back in fear.
I was able to compose myself in a calm fashion while I was squashed up against strangers on the LUAS instead of having silent panic attacks and clenching my fists so hard that my hands would start to hurt. It doesn’t matter whether you are travelling to a county in Ireland or to a completely different country abroad, but any sort of small adventure can be considered travelling. These small adventures of travelling broaden our horizons and even the shortest travel journey can help us learn things that we have never come across before, like bringing extra food for someone who is always hungry (I know from experience).
As students, money can sometimes be a bit of a setback for us when it comes to travelling. However, travelling doesn’t necessarily mean that it is always expensive. There are cheap ways of travelling that involve hiking and cycling, it doesn’t always have to be vehicle based. Hiking up the side of a mountain and motivating yourself to reach the top can be considered travelling in some way, that itself teaches you how to present yourself with challenges and see them through until you are successful. Cycling through acres of forest and miles of road can also be considered travelling as it teaches us to make decisions with the paths we choose to take and to also keep pedalling even if our legs are worn out, giving up will never get you to where you are heading towards.
It’s up to us to take the wheel and go in the direction we want to go, it is our choice to go out into the big bad world and experience it through discovering new different places through different means of travelling. We should never let someone else choose the path for us, we choose it and we are entitled to go on this journey and experience new things as we wish. Travelling anywhere is an experience that can be big or small, but no matter how big or how small, we always learn something new about ourselves along the way.
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