Dear fellow traveller,

Some of those reasons took us a long way from home. We have watched the light go flat and gold over Lake Michigan at Traverse City, and stood under the sandstone walls at Pictured Rocks with the spray coming off the water. We have done Chicago properly and New York in a hurry. We have eaten our way through Singapore twice over.

Closer to home we took the road into Kashmir, wound through Sikkim, crossed Rajasthan, spent slow weeks in Karnataka and Bangalore, and went back again and again to Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, because the mountains up there never quite let you finish with them.

Somewhere in all of that, two things became obvious to us.

The first is that travel taught us faster than school ever did.

Not in a motivational-poster way. In a practical way. A week of being lost in a city that does not speak your language will teach you more about your own resourcefulness than a semester of anything. Sharing a meal with strangers who become friends by the end of it teaches you more about people than a textbook chapter on them.

We grew up in a system that measured us out of a hundred. We are not against it, but we are certain of this much: widening the horizon of what you think the world contains matters more than scoring full marks on a paper about it. Nobody has ever asked either of us for our exam results. Plenty of people have asked where to go next.

The second is much less romantic. Planning all of it was miserable.

Every one of those trips started the same way, with a browser full of tabs and an evening gone. One tab for flights, then another, then the airline site directly because the aggregator was lying. Three more comparing the same handful of hotels and hostels across Booking, Goibibo and Agoda. A long detour through Google Maps and TripAdvisor to find one cafe worth walking to. Then five blogs deep, trying to work out whether a trek was still worth doing or had been thoroughly ruined.

Having done it that many times, in that many places, we know exactly where it breaks. We saw the good of travel and we saw the tedium in front of it. The tedium is the part that is fixable, so that is the part we are fixing.