Everything I Thought Was Important About Travel Was Wrong. It’s the Smallest Things That Matter Most.

As you get older, it’s funny what you remember.

Erik P.M. Vermeulen, PhD
4 min readMar 31, 2023

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Photo courtesy of author

“Son,” she said, “you should travel as much as possible. Whatever happens in life, nobody can take away the experiences and memories.”

I was determined to follow my mother’s advice. Luckily, my job provided lots of travel opportunities. My travel engagements took off in the 2000s.

I wasn’t interested in a frequent flyer program at first. “Why would you need the extra attention during a flight?” I was young and believed airport and airline lounges were boring.

I preferred to mingle with the traveling crowd.

My shortsightedness quickly disappeared when I began to visit airports at least bi-weekly. So, I enrolled in a frequent flyer program and soon began to level up.

And I envied the travelers with the highest status. They usually weren’t shy in showing the luggage tags that they received when they reached and maintained the highest frequent flyer level. Some of them had a whole bunch of these tags attached to their bags.

After a couple of years of intensive traveling with trips to the most exciting destinations, I belonged to the same group. And…

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