It seems to be, that part of the reason people get annoyed with travel talk, or perhaps unhealthily envious, is because there is a common misconception that travel costs a lot, and therefore, is only for the wealthiest among us. Granted travel and vacationing can be as expensive as you want to make it, but if you really want to get out there, it's a lot cheaper than you think. One of the three main travel experiences that I will talk about is a perfect demonstration of this fact, and money/cost shouldn't be as big an obstacle to traveling as we often make it.
I am a college kid, a freshman, who is 18 years old and has relatively little money, yet I've still been able to travel quite a bit. I've been able to this because of networking and involvement in the community, thrifty thinking, and occasionally through my parents. The same resources are not available to all people, but if you think outside the box (as I will talk about later on) you can get a lot further and see a lot more than you may have expected. Now I think is an appropriate time to dive into the 3 experiences that I've had that will help you think the way I do about travel and demonstrate different ways to get to your desired destination.
Travel Experience Number One: Chicago, Illinois
This is the only trip on this list that was done on my parents dollar but it is a trip that breaks an important misconception about travel. I should explain. A lot of people when budgeting or planning trips, tend to choose very exotic locations, or international locations that require a great deal of airfare. While these are potentially amazing trips, there are often potential travel experiences just as interesting and exciting within your own nation. Take Chicago for example.
My family is from Utah, but the majority of my dad's side of the family currently resides in Crystal Lake Illinois, about 40 minutes northwest of Chicago. Just after I finished 5th grade my family thought that it would be fun to go visit my family in Crystal Lake. I didn't think much of it, seeing as how we weren't going to some exotic cultural icon like Paris, Rome, or Athens, but it ended up being an awesome experience.
Growing up in the suburbs of Utah, the only large city experience I had to this point was with Salt Lake City, which many people would not even consider to be a big city. Chicago was a big city. We spent a lot of time in the city and I experienced so much, but the area that we covered was hardly anything at all in comparison to the size of the Windy City as a whole. I saw poverty like I had never seen before, was exposed to street art galleries, and got to take in the sights, sounds, and tastes of truly diverse city, all while remaining in the confines of my own country! This is a key example of how you don't have to go somewhere too exotic to have an enriching experience.
Travel Experience Number Two: Seattle, Washington
One of the other ways that I've been able to travel is through networking and involvement in the community. During my freshman year of high school, I thought it would be a good experience to join the football team. It seemed like a healthy commitment and something that would help me make friends and get me involved in the community (which it did). I stayed on the team and played the next four seasons, but something interesting came up after my sophomore season that I wasn't expecting. My coach called a team meeting and said that if we got enough ascending votes that our team would be able to travel to Seattle Washington for a week 10 away game. I thought that idea was really cool and fortunately the decision to send us to Seattle was unanimous.
The week finally came my junior season when it was time to go play East-side Catholic High School and travel to Washington. We took a plane and although I knew we were only going to be there for 4 days, it was a really cool experience. It doesn't stop raining in Seattle, which is something that I love. We got to tour Washington University, their football facilities, a little bit of the city itself, and a lot of the Washington suburbs. It was a cool experience that I was able to have because of my involvement in the community. There are more opportunities to study abroad, do service, or tour than you may think. You just need to look hard enough and then get involved!
Travel Experience Number Three: Yellowstone, Wyoming
The third and final experience that I have to share is that of Yellowstone, Wyoming. Earlier, I mentioned that travel doesn't have to be very expensive, especially if you think thriftily. I'll showcase this in this third experience.
In my junior year of high school, a lot of my friends were kids from the grade above mine. Not sure how or why this was the case but it was. Regardless, I found myself losing a lot of them to graduation in May. So a couple weeks after their class graduated, we decided to put together one last hurrah before they all went on to go do bigger and better things. Our goal was to come up with the coolest trip possible while maintaining cost efficiency. We came up with Yellowstone, a camping trip that was 6 hours away from home. We pooled together our various resources: tents, trailers, games, transportation, etc. and began working on a budget. At the end of the day, for the 7 of us, we decided that we would need about $100 dollars per person for the week.
We set out on our journey and had an amazing time at Yellowstone (it's truly one of the most beautiful places on earth). My friends and I did our best to avoid the areas usually associated with tourists, and that ended up being an awesome decision. We were truly able to explore, and take in all that Yellowstone has to offer without competition from other visitors.
At the end of the day, we still had about 200 dollars left in our pool so everyone got a little less than 30 dollar refund, meaning that this trip only cost 70 dollars per person roughly (food, gas). To me this is proof that if you want to do something cool, and experience a new place, it doesn't have to break the bank or (like Chicago) have to be super far away. Yellowstone was just a short 5-6 hour drive away from my home town and it was still one of the best weeks of my life.
So now, equipped with this new knowledge and evidence from my own experiences, I hope that you can go out and find a cool travel experience that you may not have acknowledged as a possibility prior to reading this. Good luck and best wishes!
RHETORICAL NOTES
This post is written for people who are discouraged about making travel happen realistically, or people who are pessimistic about the logistics of traveling in the future. It's written in 2016 with content focused on helping these people realize what opportunities are out there, and the blog post provides a lot of evidence that helps strengthen the author's (me) claim. This post was written because the author intrinsically likes providing people with information, talking about travel, and helping people out.
In the blogging universe, no one technically has to be an expert on a chosen subject in order to talk about it, but it helps. If a reader can look and see that the blogger has experience, whether amateur or more professionally, then it strengthens the authors argument and makes them appear more credible. There is also an element of formatting and professionalism that can set a good blog apart from a bad blog. A blog can have great information or an interesting argument, but if the color scheme is off, or the text is hard to read, or the blog is formatted in a distracting or unappealing way, it's entirely possible that the reader will choose to move onto the next blog. The best type of blogs are formatted in an innovative, but clean way that provides for the best reader experience.
In this blog post I used all three rhetorical strategies to help convey my argument. I used Pathos when I shared my experiences and described how travel made me feel and how much I valued the experiences. By being honest and genuine about my experiences and tying in my emotions about the experiences, Pathos is strongly exhibited.
By talking about my firsthand experiences as a traveler and offering new insights, I appear more credible and thus my Ethos is increased. Discussing not just one or two travel experiences, but three, makes the reader trust my claim to be a traveler.
Finally, Logos. I used Logos when I talked about the logistics of some of my trips and how, logically speaking, travel doesn't have to be anywhere too exotic or be a trip that costs a lot of money. I attempted to convince the reader to think analytically about travel in a positive way in order to break them free of any misconceptions they have in their mind. This use of Logos provides a third and final rhetorical strategy that drives home and solidifies the points that I'm trying to make.
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