No, this isn’t a post of me whining about not being able to travel to some faraway land.

In fact, I had the grandest time this summer exploring all sorts of beautiful, foreign (to me) places and landscapes right here in France. Not that I was surprised, but it is always nice to be reminded that our little country has some pretty amazing sites to offer, many more of which I’ve yet to see (Corsica is at the top of my list).

This post is about celebrating one of the best aspects of traveling: its power to make us disconnect from the daily noise so we can take true care of our deeper selves.

For the past six or seven years, I’ve kept a travel journal. It was given to me by my sister and I take it on all the multi-day trips I go on. It’s full of prompts to help wanderers see their new surroundings in ways they wouldn’t have thought to and write down even the most trivial observations. This notebook is filled with snippets and memories from trips to places as close as Normandy and as far as Malaysia. I’ve also asked friends to contribute drawings of pretty fish we saw when snorkeling together and musings about why they travel.

Thanks to this journal, I’ve become much more aware of what makes traveling so valuable to me. And sure, the warm beaches, unfamiliar foods, grand landscapes and new languages in which to say “Hello” and “Thank you” are fun, but there is also just something profoundly appeasing about uprooting yourself, even just for a few days.

Sometimes, it can really do wonders. And that’s what this post is really about.

This summer, I was lucky to be able to tell a travel story that’s near and dear to my heart for the podcast The Europeans, during its Summer of Solidarity series called The Chain, created in partnership with Are We Europe. I’d love it if you listened (it’s the second story in the episode).

This story takes place on Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands, just over a year ago. It was a time of great pain for me. I was lost, confused and needed a change of scenery. At the beginning of my trip, I climbed a volcano.