Does traveling make you more healthy?

Spoiler: Yes. Yes it does.

A book to read: A Short Walk Through a Wide World

I purchased this book at a Hudson Bookseller inside the Toronto airport. Because the book is about traveling, there are massive displays outside the airport bookseller.

A SHORT WALK THROUGH A WIDE WORLD has been compared to The Alchemist, The Life of Pi, The Midnight Library, and The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. So that’s a lot to live up to. I haven’t read the Life of Pi and disagree with The Alchemist comp. I don’t even understand The Midnight Library comparison. I mean, there are mystical libraries in both books, but that’s pretty much the only connection.

So that leaves The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. Like everyone on BookTok, I LOVED Addie LaRue. Both books begin in 19th-century France with a young woman who reluctantly leaves her family and wanders the world. Addie made a deal with the devil wherein she doesn’t have to marry this guy BUT she would live forever (kinda) and nobody would ever remember her. So, she circles the world for a couple hundred years. In A SHORT WALK, our protagonist Aubry is forced from her family when he gets a mysterious and dramatic illness that renders her unable to remain in the same location for more than a couple of days. From age nine on, once she starts bleeding out of all her facial orifices, the only cure is to leave town. For most of the book, she is hiking or sailing around the planet.

I loved it. The book was an engaging page-turner - a perfect airplane read.

A SHORT WALK does this interesting thing, which is to appeal to a sense of wanderlust despite the fact that the main character is desperate to set down her walking staff/spear and lay down in the same bed for more than five nights in a row. If you pick up A SHORT WALK while feeling sorry for yourself because you can’t travel as much as you want, the book will make you grateful for your rootedness - the perfect armchair travel novel.

A lesson to teach: The Picture Book AWAY WITH WORDS

Reading Aubry’s fictional story about the need to travel for health-related purposes makes me think of one of my favorite picture book biographies.

Photo by Jenna Vandenberg

AWAY WITH WORDS: The Daring Story of Isabella Bird, by Lori Mortensen and illustrated by Kristy Caldwell tells the story of a little girl much like Aubry from A SHORT WALK.

Isabella Bird was British, born in 1831. The fictional Aubry was born fifty years later in France. While Aubry had dramatic symptoms that rendered travel immediately necessary, the real-life Isabella Bird suffered from mysterious aches, pains, and exhaustion. “Fresh air” and then a “change of air” seemed the only cure.

So Isabella traveled. She took a sea voyage to Nova Scotia in her twenties, and spent months exploring America and writing books about her travels. When she returned home to live the small existence of a proper British lady, the malaise and aches returned.

So she set out again. She went to Australia, the Pacific Islands, Persia, the Rocky Mountains, Malaysia, Tibet, China, and Africa. The Author’s Note reads:

While she still suffered from back pain, she found life far worse reposed on a Victorian sofa than forging new paths in distant lands. “No man,” she once declared, “now ever says of any difficult think that I could not do it!”

I always teach my students about Isabella Bird during our exploration unit, as that section of the textbook is entirely devoid of women.

Often, I use the picture book AWAY WITH WORDS to teach, using the framework that I created along with Darren Guido (Supervisor of Instruction in Queen Anne’s County Public Schools) and Brianne Pitts (an Assistant Professor at Western Michigan University).

Here is a copy of the student work that my 10th graders complete as they learn about Isabella Bird. The student activities and questions all follow the framework below:

Feel free to read more about our framework here or check out some lesson plans and book ideas here.

A place to explore: Anywhere?

While travel certainly made Aubry healthier in A SHORT WALK, that story is a fantasy one. But Isabella Bird’s health improved with each trip, so the premise left me wondering: does traveling make us healthier?

When I googled “Does travel make us healthier” I found a plethora of articles touting the physical and mental benefits of travel. Here is one from Forbes, MedicalNewsToday, and WebMD.

But of course, you get what you google.

I tried “Does travel make us sick” and got several returns about “leisure sickness,” foreign diseases, the cesspools of viruses that are airplanes, and how travel causes disruptions in medication and sleep schedules here, here, and here.

Outside Magazine (an outlet with an obvious interest in promoting travel) marries both sides to the story, claiming: “…travel increases the likelihood that you might get sick, health professionals like Kingsley see traveling as an undervalued immunity-boosting trick. “Exposure to new surroundings during travel strengthens immunity as unknown variables train the body to push harder and resist better against sickness-causing germs and viruses,” she says.”

Not wanting to delve into hours of research when I’m SUPPOSED to be writing this, I decided to reflect on my own periods of long-term travel instead. Did my trips to China make me healthier? What about my trips to Europe or those months I drove in circles around the USA?

China: I spent two stints in China, the first during the summer of 2005 and then again in 2010. My first trip to China was my first time out of the country, and I was traveling with a group of teachers to lead English-speaking camps. I returned to run a half marathon in Inner Mongolia, teach at the same summer camp, and then hang out in Shanghai on my own for a few weeks.

• Health Cons: Smog. Media outlets continue to battle about how bad the smog in Beijing is. Perhaps equivalent to 40 cigarettes a day? Maybe equivalent to 1/6 of a cigarette a day? I know that whenever I finished a track workout in China, I would routinely cough up black gunk. The pollution was worse in 2005 than in 2010 (there was a major clean-up effort ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics), but smog continues to be an issue in China. Today, whenever smoke from forest fires envelope my city, the smell brings me right back to China.

• Health Pros: Learning how to eat food. I was an embarrassingly picky eater before going to China. Well into my twenties, there were about six foods I would eat. My restaurant order was always the same and I’d always have a minor panic attack before going to someone’s house for dinner. As a teenager, I’d always assumed that I’d never travel because of the magnitude of my food aversions. After a week in China, I realized that I could either eat the food in front of me or starve to death. I ate. I returned cured of my pickiness.

• Overall verdict: A lifetime of eating a variety of food seems more impactful than a few months of breathing smog, so I think I’ll call China a win. This is very scientific.

Europe: No-brainer. Of course I was healthier in Europe.

USA: This is a tricky one. I spent much of 2011 driving around America: Seattle to Wisconsin to Taos with my mom, Taos to Vegas to Miami by myself, Miami to Buffalo to Seattle to San Diego with my best friend, Seattle to New Mexico to Vegas to Denver by myself. It was kinda like van life except I had a Honda Civic instead of a van.

Health Cons:

• The eight hours we spent in Key West and I decided to eat a key lime *something* every hour on the hour.

• I ate an entire dinner and then PR’d a nighttime half marathon at Disneyworld. I was so, so sick that whole night. I’ll never run an evening marathon/half again, as clearly I can’t fuel for such things.

• There was a lot of drinking one night in NYC. And when we ditched the Freedom Trail upon discovering all the restaurants in Boston’s North End. And during football bingo in Georgia. And in Buffalo. Actually, the entire eastern seaboard featured alcohol-based evenings. Ah, to be in your twenties.

Health Pros:

• Hiking through Taos and rock climbing outside Gallup

• Running races in Montana and Arizona and Detroit

• Accidently eating an entire clove of raw garlic at that restaurant in Washington D.C. I smelled like garlic for the next two days, but isn’t garlic super healthy?

• The people. Not only was this trip incredibly special for me/Mom and then me/my friend, but also everyone else we met and stayed with along the way. This trip was a series of visits with cousins, grandparents, friends, colleagues, ex-relatives-turned-friends, boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, friends-of-friends, and random people met along with way. You know what? This bullet point alone makes up for every health con. There is nothing more healthy than making memories with people.

Happy reading, teaching, and traveling! Stay healthy friends :)

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