I know it can seem like an intimidating task to find someone to take your next trip with. But it doesn’t have to be. Let me show you how to decide who you’re going to be traveling with efficiently. Picking a travel companion has never been easier.
Perhaps you’ve never traveled with anyone else than your parents. That’s okay. But let me tell you, a whole new world will open up for you when you decide to do exactly that.
I decided to make this post because after some looking around on the internet, I couldn’t find any thorough, specific posts about this subject. I’m here to change that. You’ll be provided with a list of potential travel companions that you can choose from, based on what you need.
Still wondering who you should travel with? Let’s take a look!
The most basic (and probably also the most common) form of travel: going on a trip with your family. Parents love to take their kids somewhere, and the kids love to go somewhere with their parents.
Photo by Natalya Zaritskaya on Unsplash
It’s riskless. You know having your parents (and siblings, if applicable) as travel companions is a safe bet. They know you better than anyone and there will be no surprises.
They’re reliable. Friends might promise that they’ll come visit you when you’re abroad for some reason, but most of the time, they don’t. Your family will always come through for you.
You get to know your family even better. They say that you don’t know someone until you’ve traveled with them. You get to see people from another perspective, and that’s no different when you travel with family.
You will have a lot of memories. At any time, you can think about how you hiked a mountain together, or you got lost in a city together. The trips you take will inspire a great deal of beautiful memories.
Destinations. You, as a youngster, probably want to go do some adventurous things while you’re abroad. Your parents might prefer an easy, safe destination. (Then again, they might not.)
Personal space. When you’re traveling with family, you spend a lot of time together. You’re basically going to be seeing each other all day, every day. If that’s not something you’re prepared for, you should consider traveling with someone else.
Friends are most likely among the more popular travel companions as well, and they have good reason to be. Traveling with them is a splendid way of testing how strong your friendship really is. If you’re not afraid of that, here is why you should travel with friends.
Photo by Mike Erskine on Unsplash
Freedom to choose. As opposed to traveling with family, your friends might want the same things in your trip as you. You might be able to go hiking, visit a monastery or trek through South America.
Good company. If you’re traveling with friends, you know for a fact that you’re going to have some great people alongside you.
You know what you get. This point kind of blends in with the previous one. Your friends are your friends for a reason. They’re a you know what you’re going to get type of deal.
Safety. It’s true. A group of friends abroad is less likely to get robbed or to have anything happen to them than a solo traveler or a couple chasing their wanderlust.
Isolation. When you travel with friends, you tend not to get to know – or even talk to – people who are not already in your friends’ group. That means you’ll miss out on a huge part of traveling.
Stressful situations. When you’re traveling with friends, your friendship truly gets tested. You might find yourself in situations you haven’t been in before, and you might have to make some tough decisions.
This category is nothing but an extension on the last one, really. Having your BFF as travel companion could be amazing, but it could also turn out to be a bit of a disaster.
Photo by Cole Hutson on Unsplash
Your friendship will grow. You’ll get to know each other even better than you already do. When you’re on the road together, you see your travel companion(s) in ways that you would never see them at home.
Happiness. Every time you think back to the time you went city-tripping with your best friend in some foreign country, you’ll find yourself smiling about little things that happened. Even when you’re not back at home yet, you’ll share the happiness with your best friend. And isn’t that what friendship is all about?
Teamwork. There’s always going to be something you suck at, but that doesn’t mean that your best friend isn’t awesome at it. If you’re truly good friends, you’ll complete each other in different circumstances and you’ll be a team if there ever was one.
Arguments. Most arguments that start while you’re traveling will stay with you for a long time. After all, you can always come back to that time you/your friend got you both lost in a bad part of town, or got scammed and lost all of your money.
Responsibilities. Either one of you could potentially be a more responsible person than the other, and that can lead to frustrations with the other one. If you are doing all the work and your friend is just leeching, you won’t like that.
Choosing your significant other as a companion on your trips can be a refreshing change of pace. Whether it’s your boyfriend, fiancee, husband or partner, here are some reasons why you should (or shouldn’t) travel with them.
Image by Yuri Catalano
You’ll rediscover each other. Once again, travel is an excellent way to find out things you didn’t know about one another. How else would you figure out that your boyfriend speaks Conductor? (Yes, How I Met Your Mother, that’s a wink at you.)
It’s cheaper. Traveling in group is almost always cheaper than traveling alone, even if that group is just you and your SO. You can avoid pesky fees for booking rooms alone, you can share a private room at a hostel, … The possibilities are endless.
You can leave your comfort zone. Being in a foreign country with the one person you love more than anything in the world can really bring out another side of you. It can make you want to do crazy things you wouldn’t even consider doing back home.
It’s romantic. A weekend in Paris? A couple of days strolling through Venice? Nothing is more perfect for you and your significant other than a romantic getaway.
Your relationship will be tested. It’s almost guaranteed that you will get into some fight during your trip, be it a small disagreement or a huge blowout. These are the times when your relationship will only survive if it’s solid.
Cliché destinations. The destinations I mentioned before – Paris and Venice – are great and all. But if you are a couple that require something more adventurous, you might have to look a little bit further than that.
I know traveling alone defeats the whole purpose of finding a travel companion, but hear me out here. Solo travel is something different entirely, and I strongly believe everyone should give it a try at least once in their lives, even if it’s only to realize that you don’t like it at all and you never want to do it again.
Photo by Nina Uhlíková
You’ll learn a lot of lessons. You’ll be forced to solve problems you never would have gotten involved in otherwise, all by yourself. You get a creativity boost, because you have no choice but to be creative. You learn things that you would never find out if you don’t travel alone.
Absolute freedom. You can literally do anything you want to do. There’s nobody there you have to depend on, and nobody depending on you. If you want to skip some tour you had booked, nobody is going to tell you you shouldn’t.
Making new friends. When you’re abroad alone, you can make friends in a lot of ways. It’s very easy to meet new people and become friends with them when you’re traveling by yourself.
Experiences. Solo travel is very different from any other kind of travel. Although you might feel like you learned a lot from backpacking through South America with your friends, I can guarantee you’ll experience things more thoroughly.
You’re alone. The obvious disadvantage of having no travel companion is that you don’t have anyone to fall back on. Then again, as a solo traveler, you’re more approachable, so you might make friends more easily.
It’s more expensive. When you don’t have a travel companion, you might miss out on special deals, twin rooms, etc. Some hotels add a so-called single supplement: people who travel alone have to make up for the money they miss out on because the room is only being used by one person instead of two.
In the end, what it all comes down to is your personal preference. For some people, the disadvantages of traveling with friends won’t weigh up at all against its advantages. Other travelers will prefer being alone on the road time and again. You have to decide.
What do you prefer? City tripping with your parents? Or hiking in the mountains with friends? Let me know in the comments below.
As always, thanks for reading!
-S
Everyone who has ever taken an airplane somewhere knows how boring flying can get. That’s why I decided to make this post and introduce you to my favourite movies. Let’s get right to it! Here are 10 movies you could watch on an airplane in order to make the flight more enjoyable.
Note: in no way, shape or form am I saying these are the best movies ever. Nor am I saying these are the only movies you should watch on an airplane. I just think this list lends itself perfectly for passing some time while you’re flying to your next perfectly planned holiday.
The films I watch are mostly a mix of crime, drama, adventure and a little bit of sci-fi and mystery (or sometimes even a lot of mystery). I realize this is a very diverse set of genres, but I guess I have a very diverse taste, in that case.
I’ll add links to the IMDb page of every movie I list, so that you can look further and decide for yourself which movies you want to watch. I chose IMDb because I feel like that’s the most extensive website where you can find useful information about both films and tv shows. The website’s design is also intuitive and sleek.
Without any further ado, let’s take off! (wink)
For starters, this movie has a crazy cast. Jesse Eisenberg, Mark Ruffalo, Woody Harrelson, Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine among others star in it. If that’s not reason enough for you to watch it, there’s more. Now You See Me is about four illusionists pulling off crazy heists during their live performances and officials trying to figure out how they did it. It also has a sequel, but I feel like the original is a lot better because the concept was new.
This movie’s most impressive actors are Michael Douglas and Sean Penn. Douglas’ character, Nicholas Van Orton, is a rich banker. His brother gives him a real-life experience as a birthday present but it doesn’t really go as he had planned. I won’t spoil the rest of the movie for you, but the story line of this movie really is superb.
You might be discouraged by the fact that it came out before Y2K, but let me tell you something. Some of history’s best movies came out a very long time ago. In contemporary cinema, there is not a lot that can excel these classics. The Game is one of those classics.
Predestination is one of the most mind-boggling films I have ever seen. Even after seeing it about three times, there’s still parts of it that blow me away. Again, I won’t spoil anything, because then there’s not really a point in even watching it. But I will say that this is definitely a movie you won’t soon forget.
The story involves incredible performances by Ethan Hawke, Sarah Snook and Noah Taylor, tracking criminals, time travelling, a very odd love story and a few identity crises. If these are things you’re interested in and you haven’t seen this movie, you should definitely watch it.
Another movie with a great cast that includes Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Elijah Wood and Mark Ruffalo. In ESOTSM, Carrey and Winslet play a couple that split up. In order to forget about each other, they decide to undergo a procedure to erase their memories, and they soon find out that that wasn’t the best idea.
This movie won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, which should tell you a lot about how good the story actually is. Furthermore, seeing Jim Carrey act in a role that’s nothing like Ace Ventura or Dumb & Dumber is quite fascinating.
Another great storyline with impeccable acting and an impressive cast. Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo and Ben Kingsley all give their best. This movie, released in 2010, tells a story about a U.S. Marshal in the 1950. He is sent out to investigate how a woman charged with murder was able to escape from a Guantanamo Bay-like prison for the clinically and criminally insane.
Being a big fan of Leo’s works, I feel like this is one of his best acting efforts. You’ll have to watch Shutter Island to find out why that is, but I can only tell you that you will not regret it. (Also, Martin Scorsese directed it!)
After holding the Academy Award for Best Picture for about one minute, the cast and crew of La La Land had to give it up for Moonlight. Beside this unfortunate mix-up, I really cannot find anything wrong with this movie. It was probably one of the most anticipated movies in recent history, which only added to the experience of actually seeing it.
The impressive cast included Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone giving their best in a way we’ve never seen them before. Moreover, it included a minor role for J. K. Simmons, also known from Whiplash (another one of my favourite music-related movies and coincidentally also directed by Damien Chazelle).
You really don’t need to know more than the fact that this movie is about love. Love for jazz, love for other people, love for culture and love for the acting efforts of Gosling and Stone. Go watch it. No, seriously.
In spite of being ranked #1 on the list of top rated movies on IMDb, The Shawshank Redemption did not win any Academy Awards. Tim Robbins, Morgan Freeman and director Frank Darabont managed to transform Stephen King‘s short story into a magnificent piece of classic cinema, though.
The story is about Andy Dufresne, who is wrongfully locked up in Shawshank Prison for murdering his wife and her lover. There, he develops a friendship with Red and his partners and they go through a lot of things.
In essence, The Shawshank Redemption is a prison movie, but it’s unlike any prison movie you’ve ever seen. Even though it’s now praised all around, it originally didn’t even make enough money to cover production costs. Nowadays, it’s one of the biggest cult movies ever made. And it has good reason to be.
Yes, 1957. Now, before you say this is something you would never watch, listen up. I thought the same thing. I used to think the only good movies were the ones that came out after 2005. That was until I gave 12 Angry Men a chance. You should do so too, and here’s why.
It’s ranked #5 on IMDb’s top rated movies. The whole story goes on in one room (except a couple of minutes), and still manages to be enthralling through its exciting dialogue. It’s in black and white, but there are so many shades of grey – a lot more than 50. It’s a movie not a lot of casual watchers know, so you can impress your friends with it.
Are those enough reasons? If not, the story itself might convince you. A young man has been put on death row and 12 jurors have to decide whether he’s guilty or not. All the jurors seem to agree and it seems like the process will be over quickly. But one of the jurors is not so sure. This is the story of that juror’s train of thought.
Let’s get over the basics quickly, because really, everybody knows this movie. Even though nobody’s supposed to talk about it. IMDb top rated movies #10. Major roles for Edward Norton and Brad Pitt, and a minor role for Helena Bonham Carter. 1 Academy Award nomination. Initially didn’t make enough to cover production costs, but grew out to be one of the biggest cult classics ever made.
Here’s the story: an office worker suffering from insomnia is trying to find a way to change his life. On his path to doing so, he meets a soap maker who seems dedicated to making his new friend’s goal come true. They start an underground fight club that eventually grows out to become something neither of them could ever have imagined.
And finally, my personal favourite movie ever made (so far): The Prestige. Let me try to convince you to watch and love it as well.
Once more, the cast is nothing short of impressive. Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Scarlett Johanson and Michael Caine all made this movie what it is. Even David Bowie has a role in it. The Prestige was directed by Christopher Nolan, one of the most critically acclaimed directors around the world. (You might know him from Memento, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, Inception, Man of Steel or Interstellar)
Well, there you go! That was my list of favourite movies to pass some time with. I can honestly say I would watch these movies every time I get the opportunity to, and so should you. If there is anything you would change about this list, feel free to let me know down below!
-S
Design by NXNW.
