Being An Explorer vs A Tourist ✈️

🗺️ Tourist: A person who is traveling or visiting a place for pleasure.

🌏 Explorer: A person who explores an unfamiliar area. An adventurer.

When I was in Hvar, Croatia, I visited this interesting exhibit about NFT’s. It featured various digital art pieces - some accompanied with music and/or human voices.

One piece featured a female voice describing the difference between a tourist and an explorer. These definitions had judgmental undertones - much different from the logical, unemotional definitions featured in the opening of this post.

According to this artist, a tourist speeds through a destination trying to see everything as quickly as possible - vigorously consuming. Their experience is all about quantity over quality.

Conversely, an explorer goes at a much slower pace. Their experience is more about discovering. After hearing this, my intuition spoke to me and said - I want to be an explorer! 🙋🏾‍♀️

I want to go at a slower pace.

I want to discover‼️

Unfortunately, a cruise is a terrible place to be an explorer. In my opinion, it is the epitome of tourist style traveling. You’re only at a port for a handful of hours and you’re trying to see as much as possible before rushing back to the ship to sail to the next port.

In this moment, I realized that I was on two entirely different trips. The cruise was my tourist trip! My week in Italy after the cruise was my explorer trip.

I think neither approach to traveling is right or wrong. It’s all about where you are in life.

As I’ve gotten older, my style of travel has changed dramatically.

There used to be a time when all I could afford were weekend road trips. 🚙 💨

Then, worked my way up to short cruises in order to get out of the country. Next level, international trips with accommodations on the resort. After a while, international trips staying in a hotel - SOLO!

Now, I’ve come back to cruise life 🚢 but this time porting out of Italy and checking off a major bucket list item - sailing the Mediterranean!

In conclusion, I think I vacillate between tourist and explorer and I’m ok with that for now.

• How do you classify yourself?

• Are you an explorer?

• Or a tourist?

• Or maybe a blend of both?

• Are you the type of traveler you want to be?

Let me know in the comment section below and thanks for reading! 😘