Can ya feel them?

You look at your calendar, counting down the days until the flight (34 for me!).

You find yourself doing unnecessary amounts of research about the places you’re going to. Is there any more information for you to discover? Or are you just obsessed with the thought that your adventure is nearing rather quickly?

You stumble through your bookmark bar, reading over every article that you’ve found about the region.

You start to imagine your packing list, no matter how irrationally long from now your departure may be.

The pre-trip jitters, as I call them, can hit you a day before, a week before, or even a few months before you get on that plane. They will consume your brain space for much of the time up until the trip, and no matter how much you wish they’d just lay low for awhile, they will cease to do so. My last one hit me about a month and a half before my first trip to China. I was in the midst of toughening classes, awaiting for the journey where I would travel with 32 classmates I had yet to have the pleasure of knowing.

I’m a true believer in this idea: the strong feelings of happiness from a trip usually fall in a circle around actual trip. I usually find that the strongest feelings start a month before the trip and continue onward for about 3 weeks after the trip ends. Other points of high levels of happiness come from certain milestones, such as booking your flight, finalizing your itinerary, or stumbling upon other awesome things that you’ll be able to see on your adventure.

I just stumbled upon a Game of Thrones Tour of Dubrovnik and a performance by David Guetta at a club in Mykonos during the 3 days that I’ll be there. Needless to say, I was (and still am) irrationally excited for both of these.

But is it really irrational? There’s something about the prolonged excitement that adds to the magic of travel. As they say, it’s more so about the journey rather than the destination. That’s a lesson that I learned while visiting my old college roommate in the UAE, where the journey was something of the utmost magic.

One of my most vivid travel memories occurred when I arrived in the Abu Dhabi airport. I arrived alone, waiting for my roommate to pick me up after I picked up my luggage. I wore a basic t-shirt and yoga pants (ahhh, American travelers), and I recall waiting at the baggage claim. Another flight had just arrived and was waiting at the claim next to me. I looked at their screen, where I read that the flight had come from Mecca, Saudi Arabia–one of the most religious and controversial countries in the world. Each of the passengers was in extremely traditional Muslim dress, where the bodies of the women were entirely covered from head to toe to face. I thought to myself: Leah, you sure as hell aren’t in Kansas anymore.

The excitement from that trip (and all the others) has stayed with me ever since, but its strongest moments took up months of my life: something that I will always be grateful for.

The pre-travel jitters are one of the most magical things about an adventure, so feel them, don’t be ashamed of them, and prepare yourself for the ride. It’s going to be a beautiful one.