Travel can be a way of synthesizing dreams with reality

“Travel is mostly about dreams — dreaming of landscapes or cities, imagining yourself in them, murmuring the bewitching place names, and then finding a way to make the dream come true. The dream can also be one that involves hardship, slogging through a forest, paddling down a river, confronting suspicious people, living in a hostile place, testing your adaptability, hoping for some sort of revelation.”
–Paul Theroux, “Taking the Great American Roadtrip,” Smithsonian, September 2009