C’est merveilleux de voyager. (It’s wonderful to travel.) I heard this once when I was taking a shuttle to the gate at the airport. This was before the pandemic. I took a week to go to Paris and study at the Institut de Paris, to pass my B2 exam, to challenge myself. I took classes in the morning and then walked the city and went to museums. I read books, had time to my thoughts. I had been a stay-at-home mom for about ten years and wanted to get out for a week and accomplish something that was my own. It was an amazing time. I was grateful. I was able to go to Paris while my husband minded the children. The girls were older and could handle things. I made the best of my time in Paris, and saw it with new eyes. But this past year the travel and tourism industry took severe losses. The pandemic shut things down, globally. Society went into lockdown. Schools shut. Teachers quickly learned Microsoft Teams. Businesses learned to handle Zoom meetings. Some businesses learned to make podcasts, tried new ideas, offered online courses. Students struggled and persevered through virtual classes. But the desire to travel is still quite strong. The pandemic taught me to look at what I really loved to do. I love travel. I love meeting new people, hearing what they have to say. I love learning foreign languages. I wanted to help others to see the world and offered French lessons. Travel gets a traveler to see things they never saw before, pleasant or unpleasant. Travel presents the tangibles and the intangibles to reveal truths, if the traveler is willing to see. Travel makes you think and feel, if you are open to those possibilities, whatever they may be. Travel presents new perspectives, pushes the traveler to be flexible, offers something fresh and different, tests the traveler’s strength. A traveler can see the world from a safe bubble, but other travelers try new experiences. Francis Bacon, the English philosopher (1561-1626), wrote: “Travel in the younger sort is a part of education, in the elder a part of experience.” But what kind of education? What kind of experience? Helen Hayes, the American actress (1900-1993), wrote: “Why endeavor to straighten the road to life? The faster we travel, the less there is to see.” But what is it that we see when we travel? Ourselves? Do we long for connection? For knowledge? For a “peak experience”? When more people get vaccinated, and the dangers of the virus decrease, people will want to travel again. But, the experience of travel will be different, for the planet. How it will be different remains to be seen. We cannot go back to how we were before, though. We saw what it was like to spend time with ourselves, to be with family and to miss family, to have the space between our thoughts. Things will have to change. But there is comfort in knowing that all things change.