Travel That Changes You: 10 Best Adventures of 2019

I hate the term “bucket list.” Why chase items to tick off from some wish list? Live, live well, travel, travel well, have some adventures. Forget the bucket.

Personally, I hope to have those adventures for years to come. Magical moments can be as dramatic as climbing one of the Seven Summits (which I’ve done) or as prosaic as a mountain picnic. They can be the fruit of years of planning or an instance of pure serendipity. Either way, they leave you not only with happy memories but with glimpses of your better self. They change your perspective; they change you—that holy grail of 2020: transformative travel.

When I visited Algarve, there was a line on my itinerary that said “lightness of being Air Voyage.” I thought it might be a spa treatment, but no. Instead, it was a flight-seeing trip in a gyrocopter—a nifty, new lightweight contraption that’s like a helicopter but lighter, quieter and more fuel-efficient, qualities that allow the operator, Sky Xpedition, to take off from and fly over a protected natural park. It was an up-close look at an inexplicably beautiful coastline in a futuristic, low-impact aircraft.

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