I am sure many a times you have found yourself asking questions and chatting about trips but have you ever thought about one silly, seemingly trivial yet … slightly puzzling question?

Have you ever thought when a trip actually starts and finishes?

Does a trip start when we actually arrive at the destination? Probably yes, but then again getting somewhere may mean having to fly for 24 hours and sleep somewhere intermediately, so wouldn’t it be a shame to leave out from the whole experience these two days?

What about boarding the plane or the train? Well, then again, technically speaking, we did take a taxi before boarding and arrived at the airport which tasks are not part of our daily jobs.

What about waking up? Well, we did prepare our suitcase the previous night, we did go shopping to buy new trekking shoes or a new suitcase so could we define the start of a trip when we went shopping?

If we continue like this we might go back to the initial point that somebody suggested to us to travel to Peru, so could we define as the trip’s start that moment? Not really because in the same way we might have forgotten for a couple of years about the destination so surely the trip did not start at that instance!

In the same way, can we define the end of the trip the time the train arrived at our hometown, the time we arrived back home, the time we unpacked? And what about the time we arranged our photos in our laptop?

Well, I may have mislead you by asking a tricky question but the truth of the matter is that even through a trip may sound to be literary a movement of the body from a place to another and back, a trip most of all is a personal or collective experience. A trip is the opportunity we give to ourselves to live differently and experience something new, something extraordinary! A trip is something we offer to ours sensors to … sense different triggers related to tasting, seeing, touching, listening etc. As such, in the end of the day it is mostly a mind thing because even if we trek or eat or drink or dive or love, everything in the end is about how content and happy we become. It is a mental thing. And if we think about it, thinking of how different we may feel in a potential destination is also the initial reason in deciding to execute a trip!

So here we go.

In my personal view, a trip’s start is the point we humans start dreaming. A trip starts when we process in our mind the pure facts about a destination and we say “Yes… i want to go there because of this and that”. So the start of the trip – of the experience – is when actually our adrenaline starts to run in our body in our mind and make us feel different from our everyday lives.

So how about a trip’s end? Well, dreams are never finite. We never stop dreaming and we never stop thinking about a trip we executed. Especially in our age that we can virtually “reproduce” part of our trip courtesy of photos, videos, internet etc, we can actually re-live our trip until the point in our life we stop breathing.

Nobody can strip out of our memory our trip experiences and even though we may have come back from a destination, that experience, just like the dreams, is always there and is never extinct. So a trip never ends. It goes on forever. That is why our trips are … perpetual!