What Travel Means to Me: Then and Now

Travel became part of my life the moment I got on a plane for the first time at 21.

I still remember the night before that early morning flight to London with my best friend… I was excited, terrified and probably didn’t sleep much.

We were young, didn’t have much money and just wanted to see the world.

I wouldn’t change any of it.

And somewhere around that first flight, I realised two things:

I hated flying.

And I absolutely loved travelling.

For years, I travelled around Spain, Europe and the United States. I visited incredible cities, saw the famous sights and did a lot of the things you’re “supposed” to do when you travel.

But it was travelling through the Caribbean that started to change the way I looked at it.

I became less interested in ticking places off a list and more interested in everything happening around them.

The people.
The food.
The music.
Everyday life.
The conversations you don’t plan.
The things you learn when you stop trying to fit everything into an itinerary.

Travel became much more about connection.

And slowly, the way I wanted to travel started changing too.

I wanted to spend my money in places where it could benefit local people… I wanted to understand more about the communities I was visiting instead of simply passing through them. And I wanted to experience places as they actually were, rather than constantly looking for the version created for tourists.

I didn’t have a name for any of that at the time.

I just knew that those were the trips I remembered.

Motherhood changed the way I travelled

When I became pregnant at 27, one of the things I worried about was travel.

I genuinely thought I might have to give up one of the things I loved most.

I was wrong.

Travelling did change.

It became slower.
It required more planning.
There were naps, snacks, luggage, tiredness, tantrums and plenty of moments when whatever I had planned simply wasn’t going to happen.

But slowing down for my son also slowed me down.

I couldn’t rush through five things in a day anymore… We stopped more, we sat down more, we spent longer in places and I started noticing things I probably would have walked straight past before.

Somewhere along the way, travelling more slowly stopped feeling like a compromise and simply became the way I wanted to travel.

Taking him to the Caribbean when he was little was particularly special to me.

Part of his heritage comes from there, and seeing him surrounded by people who looked like him meant more to me than I had expected.

As he’s grown older, that has become an increasingly important part of the way we travel together.

I don’t want to tell him who he is or give him all the answers but I want to give him opportunities to experience different parts of his heritage, ask questions and eventually decide for himself what those connections mean to him.

And without really planning it, I also ended up with my favourite travel companion.

The trips changed too

Over the years, we started travelling further.

Morocco.
Senegal.
The Gambia.

Longer journeys, road trips, border crossings, delays and plenty of things that didn’t go according to plan.

People sometimes tell me I’m brave for travelling as a single mother.

I’ve never really thought about it that way.

I’m travelling because I want us to have these experiences together.

I want my son to learn that the world is much bigger than the small part of it we happen to live in.

I want him to meet people whose lives look completely different from ours, to hear other languages, eat different types of food, understand different histories and be curious rather than afraid of what he doesn’t know.

And I want that for myself too.

Because becoming a mother didn’t suddenly mean I had nothing left to learn.

How I try to travel now

I’m still learning what travelling well means.

I don’t think there’s a perfect way to do it, and I’m certainly not pretending that every trip I take is somehow meaningful or transformative.

Sometimes we’re tired.
Sometimes something is disappointing.
Sometimes we spend the afternoon doing absolutely nothing.

That’s real travel too.

But there are things I try to be more conscious of now.

I slow down when I can.
I support locally owned businesses and accommodation.
I try to learn about the history of the places I’m visiting.
I listen to people who actually live there instead of assuming I already understand.

And I try not to arrive somewhere expecting it to adapt to me.

Travel has taught me to be more comfortable when I don’t know what’s going to happen next, to listen more, to observe before forming an opinion. And, probably most importantly, to accept that I don’t need to understand everything.

What travel means to me now

Travel means something very different to me now than it did when I was 21.

Back then, a lot of it was simply about freedom.

I wanted to go somewhere new, see something different, get on a plane and discover what was on the other side.

I still love that feeling.

But now it’s also about connection.

It’s walking around somewhere without needing to be anywhere, it’s sitting down with people I didn’t know an hour earlier, it’s watching my son play with children when none of them speaks the same language.

It’s learning about histories that make me uncomfortable.

It’s eating something I can’t pronounce.

It’s getting things wrong.

It’s changing my mind.

And sometimes it’s simply sitting somewhere at sunset and realising that I don’t need to do anything else that day.

I still hate flying, by the way.

Unfortunately, that part hasn’t changed.

But 16 years after that first flight to London, I’m still choosing to travel.

Only now, I’m much less interested in how many places I can see.

I’m far more interested in what happens when I give myself enough time to actually experience them.

Now I do it with purpose, with presence and with love...

And that changes everything.