Travel Therapy!
Author and travel expert Karen Schaler explains how travel can help women get through some of life's most difficult challenges
Going through a crisis? Still healing from a bad breakup? Overwhelmed at work? Looking for inspiration? Author Karen Schaler has a suggestion: try travel.
“You can change your attitude by changing your environment,” says Schaler. Her book, Travel Therapy: Where You Need to Go?, offers ideas for a variety of trips and experiences, depending on what issues you are currently struggling with.
Recognizing that different situations and temperaments call for different solutions, Schaler breaks her book into chapters (“Heartbreak Hotel,” “Reinvent”) and presents a quiz for each one so readers can determine the types of travel experience that might meet their individual needs.
Women who are looking to reconnect with their families might want to consider Lake Tahoe or Paradise Island in the Caribbean, suggests Schaler, while someone looking to reinvent herself might think about a golf vacation or an African Safari.
Schaler understands the challenges many of us face. “When you you’ve experienced the loss of a loved one or dear friend,” she writes, “it can feel like a freight train has run over your heart, leaving you shattered, empty and exhausted.”
She is wise enough to tell us which vacations to avoid (romantic getaways if you’re trying to heal a broken heart, family fun spots if you’re attempting to revive your marriage), and while she wisely realizes that travel is not a panacea for all of life’s hardships, what she does recognize is the impact a change in location can have on a woman’s self worth, and that allowing oneself to be pampered in the Caribbean, challenged on an Asian trek or volunteering for an aid organization in Africa, can serve as a balm for life’s rough spots.
Travel may not cure all of the difficulties we are forced to deal with, but, as Schaler points out, distance, a new experience, and a change of scenery can certainly help start the healing process.
Three-time Emmy award-winning TV travel correspondent, author, writer and editor, Karen Schaler has traveled to more than 35 countries in search of the most inspiring TRAVEL THERAPY destinations. She is currently working as a freelance TV correspondent and travel host for ABC’s new national half-hour travel show featured on ABC News Now and Abcnews.com.
As the author of TRAVEL THERAPY: Where do you need to go?, Schaler is a sought after travel expert. Some of her publishing credits include: The New Yorker, Travel+Leisure, New York Daily News, Town & Country, Elite Traveler and abcnews.com. Schaler is also very active in social media with a TRAVEL THERAPY Facebook page and more than 4,000 Twitter followers.
Schaler credits her hip, edgy writing style and her wanderlust spirit to her background as a television news reporter. In 2007, Schaler was embedded with a combat helicopter unit in Afghanistan, and in 1995 she was the first reporter embedded with troops in Bosnia. She has worked as a freelance TV correspondent for CNN and a reporter/anchor at ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX affiliates in major markets across the country. Growing up outside of Seattle, Washington, Schaler has lived in thirteen different states and says her home now "is wherever I put my suitcase."
You can follow the ongoing travel therapy journey by logging on to Schaler's TRAVEL THERAPY websites at www.traveltherapytrips.com and following Schaler on Twitter and Facebook under TRAVEL THERAPY.
To purchase Travel Therapy, click here.
