If the bite-marks of the travel bug have long since faded and the symptoms have you feeling like you’re just going through the motions lately, you need to take a step back, reassess what travelling means to you and rediscover the very essence of travel. In a day and age where some people go as far as invalidating their life experiences if those experiences aren’t shared in any way on social media platforms, losing the essence of exactly why we love travelling is becoming more and more common. If your recent travels fail to inspire a desire to travel even more, there are four tricks you can employ to re-ignite your passion for that borrowed existence as a periodic, temporary nomad and rediscover your wanderlust.

Establish a Travel-Theme

One of the best ways of ensuring you don’t come back from a getaway feeling as if it was one big dream without any major events to write home about is to plan your travels according to a theme and then sticking to that theme. Any other interesting developments should be taken as welcome bonuses, but your main theme of the trip should be satisfied. If you’re travelling with your significant other, a romantic escape is just one of many themes you can plan your travels around in an attempt to force your pursuit of the essence of travelling.

Throw Darts at a Map

This perhaps appears to go against themed trips as a means through which to rediscover the essence of travel, but is just as effective in the event that you can’t settle on a specific theme. Literally throwing a dart at a map could be replaced by any other method of leaving your next destination to chance, but the ultimate aim is for you to ideally wander out of your comfort-zone, go where you’ve never gone before or somewhere you ordinarily wouldn’t consider going so that you might come back with a rich experience which makes for the ultimate essence of travel. Once you’ve completed your destination randomiser activity, only then should you proceed to find special travel deals and any associated savings, not the other way around.

Employ a Strict One-Photo Policy

Yes, you want to have a lot of visual memories to look back on, but you don’t want to spend the bulk of your precious time away on vacation posing for the perfect photo. Employ a one-photo-per-scene policy so that you can get on with the business of the travel destination experience, for goodness sake! A picture may speak a thousand words, but a rich travel experience which physically engages your senses and evokes profound thoughts and emotions is far more valuable than any photo you stop and pose for, no matter how good that photo may be.

New Experiences

The best travel stories start with the words “I really didn’t know what to expect because it was my first time trying-”, followed by whatever new experience you mustered the courage to try out. The true essence of travel lives inside new experiences, without fail, so whenever you feel as if you need to save your trip from being just another instance of going through the motions, seek out a completely new experience and try it for yourself.