Are some people genetically predisposed to travel?

Todd Bliwise was nine years old the first time he tried to stow away on an airplane. Hopping a taxi solo to the airport from his home in Palo Alto, California, Bliwise almost made it onto a flight before a staffer asked him for a boarding pass. Busted, he confessed; the staffer quickly called Todd’s frantic mother, who rushed to the terminal and collected him.

“I didn’t think about the logistics—it was just the drive: I wanted to go see things, to experience the world, something new,” Bliwise says of that day, two decades later. “I went into my parents’ closet and got one of my dad’s brown suitcases, one of those 1980s, beat-up cases and packed it full of what I thought were necessities: socks, some underwear, and crackers. I remember picking it up and feeling so accomplished.”

As Bliwise grew older, his yen to travel only intensified. Teenage Todd asked not for a stereo or new shoes, but trips and hotel certificates, and, like many 15-year-old teenagers, he secured a fake ID from a friend—in his case, though, it wasn’t for underaged bar-hopping: rather, with proof that he was 18, Bliwise could check into a hotel alone.

“I remember the first time showing that ID was a hotel near [New York's] Times Square,” says Bliwise. “I was nervous, but that experience started the rest of my life.” By the time he actually turned 18, Bliwise had checked into hotels alone in 48 of the 50 states. What career did he end up alighting on? Globetrotting travel agent, of course. “I have never had a 9 to 5 job, because I have a very difficult time with that—it’s my restlessness,” he says. “But I still love the journey to the airport, even to this day. It’s so exciting.”

Like many, Bliwise can’t remember a time when traveling wasn’t a central drive to his life, and to his personality. But can we be born wanderlusters? It’s a question travel junkies like Todd—professional wanderers who might never, say, own a home, or who count passport stamps like badges of honor—ask themselves when they haven’t slept in their own bed for nine straight weeks...and don’t seem to care. It feels innate, this impulse to travel. Or, if not a case of nature over nurture, then hormonally-driven in some way—a chemical compulsion.

Can science explain it?

https://www.cntraveler.com/story/the-science-of-wanderlust