Travel is well and truly food for the soul. Everyone knows how restful and rejuvenating a holiday can be, and everyone is acutely aware of what can be gained from taking time for oneself. Still, the compulsion to get out there and go can be hard to entice out from under the stresses of modern-day life.
Enter the road trip. Road-tripping is the perfect combination of exploration and comfort, as you control a domestic trip through some of the most amazing landscapes in the West. Why is road-tripping so good for the soul, and why should your next week off be spent travelling the UK’s B-roads?
Routine, and Breaking It
We are unavoidably creatures of habit – and habits are unavoidably useful things for us as humans. We seek patterns and are rewarded by patterns, whether the routines we set for getting up in the morning or the shape of our working week. But too much homogeneity in your day-to-day life can lead to stagnation in other areas. Breaking the routine every once in a while is a hugely healthy thing to do, with measurable benefits for mood and concentration.
The Beat of Your Own Drum
Road trips are modular things, and endlessly variable as a result. The beauty of a solo road trip is that every decision is yours to make, from how many times you stop driving to rest right down to which place will be your destination for the night.
Bringing more with you can, counterintuitively, increase the amount of freedom you have on your road trip. A passenger could get insurance for a day and drive in your stead, giving you more time to think about the next routes or simply get some good rest between stops.
Easy on the Bank Account
The major reasons that road trips are good for you are often intangible, but there is one tangible benefit – particularly over other kinds of holidays or getaways. The road trip is massively variable, but generally far cheaper than other forms of holiday.
Food and drink are often limited to snacks and soft drinks, as opposed to restaurant-style meals and expensive beverages. Fuel is the biggest overall cost, but also one that can be moderated, and that pales in comparison to the cost of many flights or even train journeys.
Personal Growth
Here, though, we get to the meat of the matter: the truly meaningful benefits that road-tripping can bestow upon you. A road trip is a seminal experience and one which encourages a lot of personal growth. The covering of miles, whether driving or as a passenger, is a crucial time for reflection, and an act of mindfulness in and of itself. This can have profound benefits for mood and comfort in your skin while allowing you to comfortably interrogate exactly what you want from yourself and life. In a noisy world, these moments are priceless.
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