12 Reasons Why Traveling With Strangers Is Better Than Traveling With Family
Traveling with strangers may initially seem daunting, but it offers unique advantages that can enhance your journey. While family trips often involve familiar routines and predictable dynamics, embarking on an adventure with new acquaintances opens the door to diverse experiences and perspectives.
This fresh approach can lead to personal growth and genuine connections you might not encounter on a typical family vacation. Here’s why you should consider traveling with strangers.
You Start With a Clean Slate
When you travel with strangers, you don’t have the weight of shared histories and family expectations to carry. When you change who you are, you get to present in a new way, free of the roles and labels that can make you who you are within your family. On this clean sheet, you get to be more agile, risky and adventurous without having to worry about what people might think or what you’ve got hanging over you.
You Go Outside Your Comfort Zone
It is often the case that you are traveling with family, and therefore stay in the comfort of familiar routines and habits. Adapting to new personalities and approaches with strangers though, is forced. By solving this challenge, you are able to grow and get more experience of the world, stepping into situations you would have never thought of if you were with family.
You Avoid Family Drama
Let’s face it: family travel is often fraught with tension. During a trip, long standing disagreements, differing opinions or even small irritations can boil over. These issues don’t exist when you travel with strangers. Instead, you’ll be more likely to be excited about the journey itself than to get lost in personal conflicts.
You Gain Fresh Perspectives
With strangers, you get new ideas, new perspectives. They might even encourage you to try a new activity or visit a new destination you wouldn’t have thought of with family. This diversity of thought though can make for a richer, a more varied and an experience where you end up going to places that you might never have gone to.
You Learn to Compromise
When traveling with family there’s an expectation of how things “should” go, but when it comes to traveling with strangers you’re on more neutral ground. It means you have to learn to communicate better and compromise better in order to get along with each other. This can make you more adaptable and more open to change and that’s great in travel and in life.
You Meet People From All Walks of Life
Traveling with strangers is one of the best things because you are exposed to people of different background, professions and cultures. What you get on the trip is each person’s experiences, so you’re getting a larger understanding of the world. These meetings could challenge your view, inspire new way of thinking, and bring you to meaningful connection that you will not have in a family setting.
You Can Reinvent Yourself
Often, family knows you too well. When you travel with strangers, there is no pre existing image of who you are, so you can try out different parts of your personality. Traveling with strangers gives you the freedom to be more outgoing, more adventurous, more introspective, more or less anything you want to be, without anyone holding you to past behaviors or expectations.
Unexpected Friendships Are What You Will Make
When you’re on a trip with strangers, you often find yourself together with others who want to explore and discover. What this common ground can do is bring up deeper connections than you think. These relationships naturally blossom when you aren’t weighed down by familial obligations, and they can often be lifelong friendships built over shared adventures and one of a kind experiences.
You Can Escape Familial Expectations
When traveling with family, you often have unwritten rules about how you should behave, where you should go, and what you should do. Sometimes a little limiting, sometimes stressful. No expectations with strangers. You don’t have to worry about doing things that will let anyone down, you are free to make decisions that work for you.
You Are Also More Likely to Try New Things
It’s easier to be in the open with strangers, and that spirit of adventure can be contagious. With family, it’s sometimes easy to just go with the known. However, when traveling with people you don’t know very well, you are more likely to be persuaded to start doing things you might not otherwise, like trying a new food, or trying something new.
You Don’t Get as Attached to Emotions
There is a little emotional baggage that comes with family trips sometimes, old memories, unresolved issues, or sometimes the pressure to make everything perfect. When you travel with strangers, you don’t have the emotional ties that come with those who you are traveling with. Certain things done this way can help create a lighter, more care free atmosphere where we’re focusing on the moment rather than on managing our emotions.
You Can Be Yourself
When you are on the road with family, it’s easy to slip back into old roles or become part of a group. With strangers, however, you can be completely yourself. This means you can do what you want without worrying about fitting into any family dynamic, and with that you can put your personal desires first and create a travel experience that is all your own.
Disclaimer: This list is solely the author’s opinion based on research and publicly available information.
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Even if you’ve been on a safari in the past, an African photo safari is something you want to experience or at the very list add to the top of your bucket list.
But first, what is a photo safari? The phrase “photo safari” is not a common sentence structure but its meaning can be deduced easily. An African photo safari in general context means going on an adventure with the sole purpose of taking high-quality pictures.
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