Deep Travel

Perhaps the greatest reward of travel is that whenever our bodies are in motion, so are our minds. I've just written a book about the strengths of this built-in link: In Motion: The Experience of Travel. Along the way I've found that the "inside" of travel can be even more fascinating than its "outside." Wherever we go, as I've been discovering -- around the block or across the globe -- we all carry within us a largely unsuspected capacity that, when activated, produces more vivid and more memorable trips. This holds true both for routine travel -- the "have-to" trips of every day -- and for more extraordinary "want-to" travel, whether that involves a quick getaway or a dream vacation.

For some people, who can see no other solution, enduring the routine and boredom of daily "have-to" travel has been made more tolerable by looking forward to long-planned "want-to" trips -- almost as if pain accumulated now can at some point be exchanged for pleasure. Such a strategy is, unfortunately, increasingly less viable. Although the available statistics are probably already outdated (and, when it comes to commuting, that generally means that things only have "dis-improved" in the meantime), according to a 2005 ABC poll, American workers spend an average of 87 minutes a day driving to and from their jobs and running errands. Aggregate these numbers and the "have-to" part of travel already outweighs the "want-to" part, since 87 minutes a day amounts to more than two-and-a-half weeks out of each year, already overshadowing the standard two-week vacation.

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