I grew up in the United States and I didn't leave the continent until I was twenty-six. I should put an asterisk on that. I grew up on the northern border of the country, on Lake Erie, and we made trips to Toronto and Montreal a few times when I was a kid. I never thought of those as international travel. They felt like longer drives to slightly cooler cities. The customs booth at the border was the same kind of friction as a tollbooth on the highway. Looking back, I should probably have made more of it. Canada is a different country with a different history and a different politics and I treated it the way I treated Pennsylvania, which is to say I didn't think about it at all.
The first time I crossed an ocean was for work, and the second time was for fun, and after that the door was open. I've spent a lot of the last decade making up for the deficit. The trips have changed how I think about the world, and they've also changed how I think about my own country, in ways that don't get talked about often enough.
Two things stick.
People are mostly the same. And the United States is the closest thing to a continent of its own that any single country offers.
People Are Mostly the Same
The first long trip I took was through Southeast Asia. Singapore one week. Bali the next. Same region, two and a half hours apart on a plane. The contrast is wild. Singapore is a global financial center with the cleanest streets you'll ever walk on, the most diverse food court in the world, and a per capita gross domestic product higher than the United States. Bali is small villages and rice terraces and people on scooters with the family piled on. The economies look almost nothing alike. The buildings look nothing alike. The streets sound nothing alike.
The people are the same.
Same jokes. Same anxieties about money. Same complaints about traffic. Same tenderness with their kids. Same patience with the tourist who can't pronounce anything. Same impatience with the tourist who didn't even try. Same families gathering on Sunday around food. The shape of the meal is different. The reason for the meal is identical.
I had been told, in different language, that this was true. Hearing it and seeing it are different. After a few trips you stop being surprised, and after a few more, you start being grateful. The world feels smaller, and not in a flattening way. People who don't speak your language are still readable, and the things they care about line up neatly with the things you care about, more often than not.
That's not a profound observation. It's a basic one. Most Americans never get to make it.
The United States Is a Continent
This is the part I didn't expect.
Once I'd done a few European trips, where you can hop between three countries on the same itinerary and feel like you've covered ground, I started doing the same kind of trip in the United States. Two weeks. Three or four cities. Different time zones. Different industries. Different food. Different accents. Different politics. Different weather. Different history.
Driving from New Orleans to Memphis to Nashville is the same length and the same kind of shift as driving from Madrid to Lisbon to Porto. The food changes. The music changes. The architecture changes. The relationship with the federal capital changes the way countries' relationships with the European Union change. New York to Charleston is not the same trip as New York to Burlington. Phoenix is not Denver, and Denver is not Boise. The Pacific Northwest doesn't think it's part of the same country as the Florida Panhandle and, in many of the ways that matter culturally, it isn't.
Most countries don't have this. Japan is wonderful and you can travel through Japan for a month and have a great time, but the cultural variance from Hokkaido to Okinawa is narrower than the variance from Vermont to Louisiana. The European Union has it, but you have to cross national borders to get it, and you're moving through twenty-seven different rule books to do it. The United States gives you that variety inside one currency, one passport check, one set of road rules, and one cell phone plan. It's a real benefit and it almost never gets called one.
The Cost Math People Don't Do
Here's the part I think gets overlooked.
If you live on the East Coast or the West Coast, an international trip is genuinely affordable. From New York, I can fly to most of Europe for less than I'd pay to fly to Los Angeles in peak season. Iceland, Portugal, and Ireland regularly run cheaper than Hawaii. The geography of low cost international travel from coastal hubs is a big reason why passport ownership in coastal states is much higher than in the middle of the country.
If you live in Wichita, Boise, Birmingham, or Des Moines, the math is brutal. The flight from Wichita to almost anywhere overseas requires two connections and almost always costs more than fifteen hundred dollars round trip before you've booked a hotel. Median household income in the United States in 2024 was about eighty-three thousand dollars. A family of four flying overseas from a non-coastal hub is looking at six thousand dollars in airfare alone. That's roughly seven percent of pretax median household income, before they've slept anywhere or eaten anything. Less than half of Americans hold a passport, and that statistic stops looking like a lack of curiosity once you do the cost math from places that aren't on a coast.
This isn't a defense of staying home. It's an observation about why so many Americans do, and why the same family that can't realistically take a kid to Paris can take that same kid to Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, the Florida Keys, Charleston, New Orleans, the redwoods, Glacier, Acadia, the Texas Hill Country, the Smoky Mountains, and Chicago for less money over the course of a decade. Domestic trips are stitched together with shorter flights, more car rides, no currency conversion, no roaming charges, and no visa fees. The United States is the country where you can compensate for not being able to afford the world by traveling deeply through your own.
What Foreigners Already Know
Europeans I've met always laugh at how little Americans travel internationally. The same Europeans then admit that, given the chance, they would happily spend three weeks driving through the Southwest, eating their way through New Orleans, watching a baseball game in Chicago, and ending in New York. The trip they would describe is exactly the trip an American with a couple weeks off and a coastal flight habit takes for granted. They romanticize the country we live in. We don't, much.
The lesson I took home from international travel is not that the United States is better than other places. It clearly isn't, on plenty of dimensions. The lesson is that the United States is unusual in the amount of variety it packs into a single country, and the cost of getting at that variety is much lower than the cost of getting at the same variety elsewhere. If you're going to be cost-constrained, and most Americans are, you happen to live in the country with the best built-in answer to the cost problem.
What I'd Tell My Twenty-Two Year Old Self
Three things.
One. Pay attention to the trip you don't think is a trip. If you grew up an hour from a foreign country, the country you grew up an hour from is still a foreign country. Treating the cross-border drive like a slightly longer commute was one of the small mistakes I made early. Toronto and Montreal are real cities in a real foreign nation, and walking around either of them at twelve and noticing nothing is a missed opportunity I'd take back if I could.
Two. Get the passport before you need it. Even if you don't use it for years. The version of you that suddenly has the chance to take a trip is going to be glad the document exists, and the version of you that puts it off is going to miss a few opportunities you don't even know are coming. The card itself is around fifty dollars and lasts a decade. Get it.
Three. Don't wait for the international trip to start traveling. The first time I drove a U-Haul from Massachusetts to New Mexico, in my early twenties, I crossed more cultural distance in nine days than my first international trip covered. I just didn't know that's what was happening. The South is a country. New England is a country. The Southwest is a country. Pacific Northwest. Appalachia. Florida. None of those places think they're the same as the others, and they're right. You can be a real traveler without ever filling out a customs form.
The world is big and it's worth seeing. So is the country, and the country happens to be the cheaper version of the same lesson. People are mostly the same everywhere. Place is not. The United States is the rare country where you can study that distinction in depth without ever leaving it, and that's worth being grateful for, especially if you live somewhere that the international flight prices won't otherwise let you go.