How to Keep Your Wanderlust Alive When You Can’t Travel

Keeping your wanderlust alive when you can’t travel, can be challenging at times. Definitely when all you really want to do is travel. For me, I sometimes get that travel itch, where I’m ready to completely plan a trip, book it, and go on it immediately, but then reality hits that I can’t travel as soon as I would love to. So I had to come up with ways to keep my wanderlust alive. Here are a few ways you can also keep your wanderlust alive when you can’t travel.

Build your travel skills

Traveling consists of so much more than just being in another destination. Depending on the type of traveler you are, it could take research, planning, creating an itinerary, learning key phrases in the language, photography, videography, blogging, journaling, editing, packing, and more. When you can’t travel, that will be a great time to either build your travel skills or learn new travel skills.

There are many online courses and apps that you can use. To help create an itinerary, you can use apps like TripIt and Wanderlog. To learn a language, you can use apps like Babel, Duolingo, Memrise, and Speak. For photography, videography, blogging, and editing, you can take courses with Coursera, Skillshare, and Udemy. They even offer a few free courses. You can also learn most, if not all, of these things on Youtube.

Bring travel to your home

There are many fun ways that you can bring travel to your home. For instance, you can cook dishes from different cultures. If you enjoy meal prepping, maybe every week you can choose a dish from a different culture and that will be one of your daily meals for the week. If you tend to make meals on a daily basis, then maybe you can pick a culture and make a variety of dishes from that culture for the week.

You can also learn how to play a traditional instrument or a style of dance. When you can finally travel to that destination, you can show off what you’ve learned.

Connect with the traveling community

Joining travel groups on platforms such as Facebook, Reddit, and Meetup can keep you inspired and connected with fellow travelers while you’re not traveling. You can also follow travel influencers and bloggers on social media to get your dose of travel, learn new things about destinations, and stay inspired. You can also create your own travel blog to document your previous travel adventures and experiences. This can help other travelers stay inspired while traveling and while not traveling. This can even open the door to you writing guest posts for other travel bloggers.

Explore locally

Since you can’t travel, this is the perfect time to explore your area, town or city. You can explore local museums and cultural centers, go on a hike, eat at a new restaurant or cafe, go to a international market, or even a food festival that has a variety of food vendors selling food from different cultures.

There are also many cities that have neighborhoods that are named after a country or city. For instance in Miami, there’s neighborhoods like Little Haiti, and Little Havana. In NYC, there’s neighborhoods like Little Italy, Little Guyana, Chinatown, and Koreatown.

Plan future trips

Planning future trips is one of the top things for me personally that keeps my wanderlust alive. It gives me something to look forward to. It also helps me learn a lot about the destinations that I want to travel to, and makes it easier for me to envision me being there. Sometimes I plan a trip so thoroughly, I will just sit back, close my eyes, and envision me doing everything that I have on my itinerary. Also another bonus about planning future trips is that you will have itineraries ready for when you could travel.

Relive past adventures

Spend some time going through your travel photos and videos. Looking at travel photos and videos can bring back memories, great experiences, inspire you to travel again when you can, and give you travel destination ideas. I tend to go through photos and videos I posted on social media, as well as reading my blog posts about previous adventures I’ve done.

Stay or get Fit for future adventures

If you love adventures like hiking, rock climbing, skiing, and cycling, take advantage of your time off from traveling to prepare yourself for those adventures.

For instance, for the Inca Trail hike to Machu Picchu, I booked it about seven months in advance, and spent most of that time training for the hike. I went on numerous hikes, from beginner to intermediate, I ran and went to the gym multiple times a week, and I always took the stairs over escalaters and elevators.

For more information about the Inca Trail hike and how I prepared for it, click Hiking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu: Before the hike.

To check out my Inca Trail hike to Machu Picchu experience, click 4 Day Inca Trail Hike to Machu Picchu.