BootsnAll Travel Community

Alright fellow travel junkies tell me, where did your wanderlust begin? Were you raised by people who valued travel and brought you to exotic sites as a wee one? Did your family move to a different country? Or are you the odd child in your family, born and raised in the same place with little exposure to travel and different cultures.

Is there a travel gene? Or have our experiences influenced our need to wander?


I did not even leave the North East Coast of the states until my mid 20s. My family had neither the money nor the inclination to travel. This just was not part of our upbringing. My sister is also a traveler and an expat. My other sister has no need to leave the state she lives in. I guess my vote would be Nature.

But I'm hoping everyone's opinion will lean towards Nurture because I have younguns that I hope to bring willingly with me on my travels.

Well, in my instance - my mother has never travelled. Nor, to my knowledge, had my father. Neither seemed overly interested in it either. So.... I guess it is neither. lol. Must be nurture - in that I was smothered in one place for too long!

I don't know if either nurture or nature can full responsibility. But if I had to say, based on my experiences in life, I'd say that nature plays a larger role in travel desires. Looking at my family it certainly seems that way. My dad was a hard core traveler for years, my mom certainly traveled more than most. They raised me and my 2 younger bros in a great environment and we took a lot of trips. But in no way was it an excessive traveling childhood. But now I"m fully addicted to traveling and neither of my bros have much if any desire to travel. I've always felt like I was born to travel and explore the world. But I also feel that someone could certainly be nurtured to travel. One of the biggest things to hinder travel is a persons uncomfortablity in new places so if your kids were raised to feel comfortable in new environments than travel would certainly be more enjoyable and appealing for them in the future.

I grew up handling statues from India, elephant figurines from Thailand and scarves from China to Syria. Everytime I would play with these things I would think about where they came from and...naturally invent places in my mind.
When I was around 8 or so I decided that from now on I would walk around barefoot. Why? Because when I moved to an island in the South Pacific shoes might not be readily avalible. And I was gonna go there any day now. I just knew it. I'd hop on a ship. I saw ships all the time. One of them just had to be headed that way. It wasn't until my mom threatened me with severe grounding that I put my shoes back on.
But the biggest thing? Map-o-the-World Placemats. We would spend time quizzing eachother at dinner as to what country was where and what did they do there and yada yada.
Nature, Nuture. I think mine was certainy nutured.