I am a freshly minted twenty-year-old and English Literature and Creative Writing major from the Southeast with a yen to travel. I’ve been to the Philippines, Malaysia, the Bahamas, Italy, Spain, and 21 American states and territories (including Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.).

Thanks to generous funding from Agnes Scott College and News Channel 3′s Knowledge Bowl, I’ll be studying abroad twice. First I’ll be in Madrid and Oviedo in Spain for five weeks from June to July 2011. Then, hopefully, I’ll be studying from January to May 2012 in Glasgow, Scotland in the United Kingdom.

If I was pithier, I would be waxing about why I love to travel, but I think these celebrated folks sum it up better than I ever could:

The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.  ~St. Augustine

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

A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.  ~Lao Tzu

No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.  ~Lin Yutang

Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.  ~Seneca

The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience.  The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him.  He goes “sight-seeing.”  ~Daniel J. Boorstin

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

I travel a lot; I hate having my life disrupted by routine.  ~Caskie Stinnett

I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.  ~George Bernard Shaw

We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.  ~Hilaire Belloc

Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.  ~Benjamin Disraeli

Header courtesy of 1europe.eu.