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[laraehrlich-blog]

Original content owned & copyrighted by Green Global Travel.

I was a voracious reader when I was growing up, typically reading two books a week on average.

My lower-middle class family didn’t have the money to do much in the way of traveling, outside of the occasional camping trip in North Georgia. Both my parents worked, and my dad worked multiple jobs to support his family of five.

The furthest we ever traveled was a trip to visit my godparents in Treasure Island and Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books to Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.

It was through Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, John Muir’s Our National Parks, and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s  that I developed a passion for the environment. Without them, who knows if I would’ve become the advocate for Jon Krakauer, Bill Bryson and Paul Theroux greatly influenced the way I did it.

But the first classic quote I remember having a significant impact on me came in the form of a Robert Frost poem: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by. And that has made all the difference.” This idea influenced many of my choices, setting me on the path to becoming a full-time READ MORE: The Best Travel Books to Inspire A Love of Adventure

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1. “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” –Marcel Proust

2. “Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.” –Pat Conroy

3. “Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.” –Freya Stark

4. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” –Mark Twain

5. “Travel is more than the seeing of sights. It is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” –Miriam Beard

6.  “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.” –Paul Theroux

7. “One of the gladdest moments of human life, me thinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of habit, the leaden weight of routine, the cloak of many cares and the slavery of home, man feels once more happy.” –Sir Richard Burton

8.  “I travel around the world in a way that tries to open my mind and give me empathy and inspire me to come home and make this world a better place.” –READ MORE: Why Responsible Travel Matters (& Greenwashing Sucks)

About Adventure Travel

11.  “Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.” –Andre Gide

12.  “We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.” –Jawaharial Nehru

13. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” –H. Jackson Brown Jr.

14.  “To move, to breathe, to fly, to float, to gain all while you give, To roam the roads of lands remote, To travel is to live.” –Hans Christian Andersen

15.  “In the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn

16.  “If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine; it is lethal.” –Paulo Coelho

17.  “Adventure isn’t hanging on a rope off the side of a READ MORE: Water Wonders (A Father-Daughter Story of Adventure)

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21.  “Never get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life.” –Anonymous

22.  “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.” –Helen Keller

23.  “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.” –Saint Augustine

24.  “Travel brings power and love back into your life.” –Rumi

25.  “Only one who wanders finds new paths.” –Norwegian Proverb

26.  “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” –Lao Tzu

27.  “Make voyages! Attempt them… there’s nothing else.” –Tennesee Williams

28.  “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.” –Anais Nin

29.  “Your feet will take you where your heart is.” –Irish proverb

30.  “Until you step into the unknown, you don’t know what you’re made of.” –Roy T. Bennett

READ MORE: NatGeo’s Don George on Travel Writing & Blogging

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31.  “To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a

36. “We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors. We borrow it from our children” –Chief Seattle

37. “We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey.” –John Hope Franklin

38. “Two of the greatest gifts we can give our children are roots and wings.” –Hodding Carter

39. “When you travel with children you are giving something that can never be taken away… experience, exposure, and a way of life.” –Pamela T. Chandler

40. “A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.” –Tim Cahill

READ MORE: 7 Important Life Lessons I Learned in the Galapagos Islands

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41.  “The further I go, the closer to me I get.” –Roman Payne, The Wanderess

43 “I am convinced that the jealous, the angry, the bitter and the egotistical are the first to race to the top of mountains. A confident person enjoys the journey, the people they meet along the way and sees life not as a competition. They reach the summit last because they know God isn’t at the top waiting for them. He is down below helping his followers to understand that the view is glorious where ever you stand.” –Shannon L. Alder

44.  “A person susceptible to ‘wanderlust’ is not so much addicted to movement as committed to transformation.” — Pico Iyer

45. “How will I know who I can become if I don’t give myself the chance to try new things, to push myself beyond my normal boundaries? Who might I be if I am away from the things that I currently use to define myself?” ― Eileen Cook, With Malice

46.  “Two roads diverged in a wood and I– I took the one less traveled by… And that has made all the difference.” –Robert Frost

47. “To get away from one’s working environment is, in a sense, to get away from one’s self; and this is often the chief advantage of travel and change.” – Charles Horton Cooley

48.  “Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it.” – Eudora Welty

49.  “Travel only with thy equals or thy betters; if there are none, travel alone.” — The Dhammapada

50.  “All I wanted was to live a life where I could be me, and be okay with that. I had no need for material possessions, money, or even close friends with me on my journey. I never understood people very well anyway, and they never seemed to understand me very well either. All I wanted was my Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: In Search For The Great Perhaps

READ MORE: 45 Pieces of Advice I’d Include in a Letter to My Younger Self

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51. “As soon as I saw you, I knew an adventure was about to happen.”—A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh

52.  “Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.” —Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

53.  “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” – John Steinbeck

54.  “And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, in dimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.” — Pico Iyer

55.  “The more I traveled the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.” — Shirley MacLaine

56.  “Actually, the best gift you could have given her was a lifetime of adventures.”– Lewis Carroll

57.  “Traveling is like flirting with life. It’s like saying, “I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.” — Lisa St. Aubin de Teran

58. “What we find in a soulmate is not something wild to tame, but something wild to run with.” — Robert Brault

59.  “Love is the food of life, travel is dessert.” – Anonymous

60.  “To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery.” — Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost)

READ MORE: Bret & Mary, A Story About Love (& How GGT Was Born)

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61.  “Once in a while it really hits people that they don’t have to experience the world in the way they have been told to.” -Alan Keightley

62.  “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, ‘Wow! What a Ride!'” — Hunter S. Thompson (The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967)

63. “If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion, and avoid the people, you might better stay home.” – James Michener

64.  “What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do — especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you.  No yesterdays on the road.” -William Least Heat Moon

65.  “Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all the familiar comforts of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things– air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky– all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” – Cesare Pavese

66.  “READ MORE: The Country of Jordan, the Middle East & Our Culture of Fear

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71.  “It’s not what you look at that matters. It’s what you see.” -Henry David Thoreau

72.  “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson

73.  “Not all those who wander are lost.” –J.R.R. Tolkien

74.  “Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.” –Neale Donald Walsch

75.  “Don’t tell me the sky’s the limit when there are footsteps on the moon.” – Paul Brandt

76.  “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” – George Bernard Shaw

77.  “Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the Universe.” –Anatole France

78.  “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.” –St. Augustine

79.  “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” —H. Jackson Brown, Jr. in P.S. I Love You

80.  “I find the great thing in this world is not so much about where we stand, as in what direction we are moving… We must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, – but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.” -Oliver Wendell Holmes

READ MORE: The World’s Best Small Ship Cruises

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81.  “Stop creating a life that you need a vacation from. Instead, move to where you want to live, do what you want to do, start what you want to start, and create the life you want today. This isn’t rehearsal, people. This is YOUR life.” –Dale Partridge

82.  “To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.” –Bill Bryson

83. “Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you’ve never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground.” ―Judith Thurman

84.  “Travel is the antidote to fear. It makes you see the similarities and differences that exist around the world, and it opens your eyes– and mind– to new and different approaches.” –Julia Cosgrove

85.  “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” ― Robert Louis Stevenson

86.  “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

87. “The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.” —Christopher McCandless

88.  “Travel while you are young and able. Don’t worry about the money, just make it work. Experience is far more valuable than money will ever be.” — Anonymous

89. “If I’m an advocate for anything, it’s to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in someone else’s shoes or at least eat their food, it’s a plus for everybody. Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.” –READ MORE: How to Start a Travel Blog (& Build a Successful Business)

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91. “Look deeper into John Muir, The Mountains of California

95.  “When the blood in your veins returns to the sea, and the earth in your bones returns to the ground, perhaps then you will remember that this land does not belong to you– it is YOU who belongs to this land.” –Native American proverb

96.  “Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realize we cannot eat money.” –Cree Indian Proverb

97.   “I went to the

The post The 100 Best Travel to Spark Your Next Adventure appeared first on Green Global Travel.

[laraehrlich-blog]

Original content owned & copyrighted by Green Global Travel.

When dreaming about Europe, most travelers imagine sipping READ MORE: How Mass Tourism is Destroying Destinations Travelers Love

  THE LEAST VISITED NATIONAL PARKS IN EUROPE

Sipoo National Park

Sipoonkorpi National Park (Finland)

Considering the fact that it’s a relatively small country,there an incredible number of national parks in Finland (39, and soon to be 40).

The easiest to access from Helsinki is Nuuksio National Park, which is famous for its Sipoonkorpi National Park, a wild stretch of pine and birch READ MORE: Winter Adventures in Finnish Lapland

Marloes Peninsula, Pembrokeshire by Donar Reiskoffer  GFDL

Pembrokshire Coast National Park (Wales)

Wales is famous for its castles, hills, and sheep. But did you know that the Welsh coastline is also home to dramatic Pembrokshire Coast Path. 

The path is mostly at cliff-height, affording stunning views over the incredible rock formations dotted around the coast. Think arches, stacks, and sea READ MORE: 10 Eco-Friendly European Islands (World Travel Bucket List)

Slovenský raj, © Matej Kohút

Slovenski Raj National Park (Slovakia)

If you like adventure and you’re not afraid to clamber up and down a slippery ladder over a waterfall, this is the place for you! Slovenski Raj means “Slovak Paradise.”

It’s one of Slovakia’s nine national parks, located in the Eastern part of the country, not far from Poprad and Tatra Mountains.

The area is rich in rivers and streams, which have carved the surrounding mountains over the centuries to create gorges and canyons with beautiful waterfalls.

READ MORE: The European Green Capital of Ljubljana, Slovenia

Calanques National Park By Vincent, Public Domain

Calanques National Park (France)

Though it’s not as well known as Cévennes National Park (a UNESCO World Heritage Site), climbers from all over Europe have been flocking to the mountains of Calanques National Park since the 1970s.

Located relatively close to the city of Marseille, the park’s dramatic limestone cliffs overlook the sea, and offer perfect climbing conditions year round.

But fear not– you don’t need to be a rock climber to enjoy this national park. There are also miles of well-marked hiking trails, several caves, and opportunities forREAD MORE: 

Wolf in Abruzzo National Park By Guido Mastrobono-Lupo Appenninico, CC

Abruzzo National Park (Italy)

The Abruzzo region is located in central-eastern READ MORE: A Local’s Favorite PLaces to Visit in Le Marche, Italy

Kornati National Park (Croatia)

The Kornati archipelago has been called “a sailing paradise” by those in the yachting world. It easily ranks as our favorite national park in Croatia, and among the most beautiful national parks in Europe

Located not far from the coast of Zadar, Kornati National Park includes 140 islands in an area that is only 35 kilometers long, making this the densest archipelago in the world.

The best way to explore the archipelago is by chartering your own sailboat. That way you can spend as many days as you want hopping from one island to the other, sampling delicious seafood at local konoba, and swimming in the clear Adriatic waters.

If your budget doesn’t stretch that far, you can always join a group boat tour from Zadar. Either way, it’s a great, uncrowded place to add to your national parks checklist. 

READ MORE: Overtourism at Plitvice Lakes National Park, Croatia

Narrowest part of Samaria Gorge, Crete by Japo Public Domain

Samaria National Park (Greece)

A hike across the Samaria Gorge (one of our kri-kri, an endemic Cretan goat, which can sometimes be seen munching on grass along the cliffs. –Margherita Ragg; photos by Nick Burns unless otherwise noted

  If you enjoy reading about the world’s best National Parks, you might also like: 

Pitch Your Park! Rangers Plug Six of the Best US National Parks

The Crowded Planet with her husband Nick Burns, an Australian  photographer. Margherita has an MA in Travel and Nature Writing from Bath Spa University, and was runner-up to the 2012 Guardian Travel Writer of the Year competition. Her other passions are rock climbing, skiing, homebrewing and her cat, Tappo. Follow Margherita on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest.

  The post The Least Visited National Parks in Europe appeared first on Green Global Travel.