Making Travel a Priority

The highlight reel, the cheap lunches, and why every new view is worth it

How do you travel so much? How are you always out doing something? I get asked some version of this pretty regularly and I never know quite how to answer it in the moment, but I’ve been thinking about it and I think it comes down to a few things.

You’re only seeing part of the picture. What shows up on social is the good stuff, a curated view, the best of the best. Substack is a little more behind the scenes than that, but even here not everything I see or every place I go makes it to the page. I wrote about that a while back if you want to dig into it. What you don’t see anywhere is the rest of it. The days sitting behind a computer. The laundry. The dishes. The general upkeep of being a person with a house and responsibilities. I’m not out there living some untethered life. I’m just choosing what to share, and I’m choosing the parts worth remembering.

Part of it is also just where the money goes.

I eat cheap during the week. Simple, repetitive, nothing exciting. I don’t spend money on stuff to fill shelves or upgrade things that already work. The bills get paid. Debt gets attacked as aggressively as I can manage, and getting out from under it entirely in the next two years is a real goal. When I have money left over after all of that, I don’t save it for some future version of myself who may or may not be healthy enough to do what I want to do. I spend it on going somewhere.

Scott and I found ourselves on the Salt River a lot during COVID, one of the few places you could actually be outside with another person. It was on one of those paddles that he first shared this idea with me. Back then it was just a budding thought he was turning over. Now it’s an entire philosophy. He calls it Return on Adventure. ROA. Think of it like the financial concept of return on investment, but applied to the experiences you choose to spend your time and money on. The idea is that a trip doesn’t just pay off while you’re on it. Every time you recall a view, a meal, a moment on the road, that memory adds to the total value of the experience. The return compounds over time, the same way a good investment does. Scott has spent years developing that seed into something much more fully realized, and it’s worth looking up if the idea resonates with you.

That idea has stuck with me ever since. You're not spending money on a trip. You're investing in something that pays you back for the rest of your life. Every cheap lunch I eat during the week is me choosing a higher return on something that actually matters to me.

Now, I know what some of you are thinking. That’s fine for you, but I have kids. I have debt. I can’t just pick up and go somewhere. I get it. Some of those reasons are real and I’m not dismissing them. Life is complicated and everyone’s situation is different.

But I’ll be honest with you about something. A lot of the time when I hear those reasons, what I’m actually hearing is someone who hasn’t tried yet. Not because they can’t. Because planning something new is uncomfortable. Spending money on something uncertain is uncomfortable. Leaving the routine you’ve built is uncomfortable. Those things are real. They just aren’t the same as impossible.

Traveling with kids is hard. It is also completely possible and something a lot of people do. Traveling on a tight budget is hard. It is also completely possible. The version of travel you’re imagining might not be the version available to you right now, and that’s okay. Start with the version that is.

Because here’s what I’ve found. Nobody just finds the time or stumbles into the money. You make choices that create space for it, and then you protect that space. It takes effort. It takes saying no to some things so you can say yes to others. It is not passive.

I can’t tell you there was one trip that made me this way or one view that changed everything. It’s more that every new view does it. Every time I’m standing somewhere I’ve never stood before, I remember why I keep arranging my life around the next one.

That’s the whole system, really. Cheap lunches, empty shelves, and somewhere new to be.

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What’s your version of the “because”? I’d love to hear it in the comments. And if you want to see the places behind the cheap lunches, they’re all at Wander the Road.