a trip to the future essay

Time Travel and Possible Consequences Essay (Speech)

Introduction, time travel: rewriting history. possible consequences, improvement or a step backward.

Time travel is one of the ideas that has been occupying the minds of several people from science fiction writers to average citizens for a while. Even though the concept has been proven practically impossible by now, the idea still retains its power and stirs people’s imagination. Taking the classical idea of time travel as the process that can potentially alter the present time, I would move further in time to explore the wonders of the future without dreading that I could disrupt the current environment beyond recognition.

Numerous sci-fi novels have taught people that time travel requires a lot of responsibility. Any minor change that one makes to the past will inevitably result in tremendous and possibly disastrous effects on the present-day environment. Therefore, I would not like the idea of going back to the past, even though witnessing a particularly spectacular event such as the first successful flight would be delightful.

However, traveling to the future is theoretically also fraught with numerous challenges. For example, if I traveled to the future, I would be excited to see technological innovations and advances, yet I would be very hesitant to tell about them in our time. What might seem like a massive improvement may have detrimental effects if people are not ready to use the suggested tools?

Even though the idea of time travel has been practically proven impossible, I would be thrilled to travel to the future and see the innovations and progress that people will have witnessed. It would be amazing to talk to the people of the future and see what discoveries they will have made and how far they will have advanced by the time I arrive. Using time travel to learn more about future technological advances and the means of coping with some of the current issues, including incurable diseases, overpopulation, etc., would be a fascinating experience.

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Time Travel: Dream or Possible Reality?

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Time travel is a favorite plot device in science fiction stories and movies. Perhaps the most famous recent series is Dr. Who , with its traveling Time Lords who whisk throughout time as if traveling by jet. In other stories, the time travel is due to unexplainable circumstances such as a too-close approach to a very massive object like a black hole. In Star Trek: The Voyage Home , the plot device was a trip around the Sun that hurled Kirk and Spock back to 20th century Earth. In the popular movie series Back to the Future , the characters traveled both backward and forward in time. However it is described in stories, traveling through time seems to pique people's interest and ignite their imaginations. But, is such a thing possible? 

The Nature of Time

It's important to remember that we are always traveling into the future. That's the nature of space-time. This is why we remember the past (instead of "remembering" the future). The future is largely unpredictable because it hasn't happened yet, but everyone is headed into it all the time.

To speed up the process, to peer further into the future, to experience events more quickly than those around us, what would or could anyone do to make it happen? It's a good question without a definitive answer. Right now, no one has built a working time machine to travel temporally.

Traveling into the Future

While it's not possible (yet) to travel to the future fast than the rate at which we're doing it now, it is possible to speed up the passage of time. But, it only happens in small increments of time. And, it has only happened (so far) to very few people who have traveled off Earth's surface. For them, time moves at an infinitesimally different rate. Could it happen over longer time spans? 

It might, theoretically. According to Einstein's theory of special relativity , the passage of time is relative to an object's speed. The more quickly an object moves through space, the more slowly time passes for it compared to an observer traveling at a slower pace. 

The classic example of traveling into the future is the twin paradox . It works like this: take a pair of twins, each 20 years old. They live on Earth. One takes off on a spaceship on a five-year journey traveling at nearly the speed of light . The traveling twin ages five years while on the journey and returns to Earth at the age of 25. However, the twin who stayed behind is 95 years old! The twin on the ship experienced only five years of time passing, but returns to an Earth that is much farther into the future.

Using Gravity as a Means of Time Travel

In much the same way that traveling at speeds close to the speed of light can slow down perceived time, intense gravitational fields can have the same effect.

Gravity only affects the movement of space, but also the flow of time. Time passes more slowly for an observer inside a massive object's gravitational well. The stronger the gravity, the more it affects the flow of time. 

Astronauts on the  International Space Station experience a combination of these effects, though on a much smaller scale. Since they are traveling quite quickly and orbiting around Earth (a massive body with significant gravity), time slows down for them compared to people on Earth. The difference is much less than a second over the course of their time in space. But, it is measurable.

Could We Ever Travel into the Future?

Until we can figure out a way to approach the speed of light (and warp drive doesn't count , not that we know how to do that at this point, either), or travel near black holes (or travel to black holes for that matter) without falling in, we won't be able to do time travel any significant way into the future. 

Travel into the Past

Moving into the past is also impossible given our current technology. If it were possible, some peculiar effects could occur. These include the famous "go back in time and kill your grandfather" paradox. If you did do it, you couldn't do it, because you already killed him, so therefore you don't exist and can't go back in time to do the dastardly deed. Confusing, isn't it? 

Key Takeaways

• Time travel is a science fiction trope that may possibly be technically possible. But, no one has achieved it.
• We do travel into the future all our lives, at a second per second. To do it faster requires technology we don't have.
• Travel to the past is also impossible at the present time.
• Is Time Travel Possible?| Explore , www.physics.org/article-questions.asp?id=131.
• NASA , NASA, spaceplace.nasa.gov/review/dr-marc-space/time-travel.html.
• “Time Travel.”  TV Tropes , tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TimeTravel.

Edited by Carolyn Collins Petersen .

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The learning network | if you could time-travel, where would you go.

If You Could Time-Travel, Where Would You Go?

Critics’ picks: ‘back to the future’.

A. O. Scott explores the existential predicaments that arise in Robert Zemeckis’s 1985 time-travel adventure.

Questions about issues in the news for students 13 and older.

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Inspired by the fact that today is the day we finally catch up to the tomorrow depicted in “Back to the Future, Part II,” we wonder, if you could time-travel to any year or era past or future, where would you go? Why?

To give you a few ideas, we found this article from last March about “ 5 Ways to Time-Travel (and Party) in New York ”:

When William Faulkner famously mused on the power of history — “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” he wrote — he probably didn’t have New York foremost in mind. The city, not known for its ability to hold on to old and historic spaces, has often directed its energy manically to the future. But in 2015, a contrarian spirit lives on in the city, and anyone with a passion for the past can plunge into almost any historical period for just a few dollars — and, in some of the more theatrical parties, by also investing in some decent vintage duds.

The article goes on to describe a number of events around the city that celebrate eras and cultures, including…

• The speakeasy era (1920s and ’30s)
• The Victorian era (mid- to late 1800s)
• The Revolutionary War era (1770s)
• The “Mad Men” era (1960s)

Students: Tell us …

— If you could go back or forward in time to make a visit, where would you go, and why?

— In general, are you more interested in visiting the past or visiting the future? Why?

— What do you imagine you might encounter in this visit? What questions do you have?

— What gift(s) for the people of this new time and place would you most like to take on this visit? Why?

Students 13 and older are invited to comment below. All comments are moderated by Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

What's Next

Would You Rather Travel to the Past or to the Future?

What does recent research say about time travel preferences.

Posted October 28, 2013

About nine years ago, on a chilly October night, Ichiro Suzuki hit his 258 th hit of the year. In doing so, he broke the record for number of hits in a season that was set by George Sisler way back in 1920. As the whole team rushes out of the dugout to celebrate with Ichiro, the camera pans over to the third base line, where we see an older woman wearing a cream-colored jacket and a reserved smile. It’s Sisler’s octogenarian daughter.

In one of the classier moments from baseball history, Ichiro leaves his teammates, runs over to her, and bows. The tears that were already in her eyes spill out a bit more and she graciously thanks him for acknowledging her, as well as her now long-deceased father. It was impossible in that moment to not only think back to the time when Sisler first set the record, but also ahead to the future, when someone will inevitably best Ichiro’s accomplishment. This is one of the things I love about baseball: it’s both a timeless sport as well as one that makes mental time travel relatively easy.

All of this came to mind a few weeks ago as I watched David Ortiz hit a grand slam to put the Red Sox ahead of the Tigers in one of the playoff games. I found myself wondering about similar dramatic playoff moments from the past (like Carlton Fisk’s ’75 walk-off homer), and the ones that would occur in the years to come. I’m not sure if it the grand slam prompted TBS to start playing classic baseball footage or if I had just had a bit too much pumpkin beer, but I had a thought: would I rather travel back to the past to witness one of these incredible moments or zoom ahead to the future to see what might yet occur?

It turns out that I’m not the only one to wonder about the best direction to travel in time. This question was actually put forth to a group of several hundred research participants in a new paper by Florence Ettlin and Ralph Hertwig . The authors were simply curious which direction people would choose, and how their answers would map on to other aspects of their lives. In an analysis like this, there are really an endless number of factors that such a variable (that is, time travel preference) could map on to. But the authors chose to look at a specific few: age, risk attitudes, and conservatism/liberalism. How might each map onto preference for time travel?

Risk . There’s a fundamental asymmetry between the past and the future: the past represents a collection of definitive events, while the future is unpredictable, unknown, and not fixed. The authors reasoned that people who are more actively seek out risk in their daily lives would also be more likely to want to travel to the “less known and predictable future, relative to the more familiar and more predictable past.”

Conservatism/Liberalism . In previous research, conservatism has been linked to an acceptance of inequality as well as a fear of change. Liberalism, by contrast, has been associated with an endorsement of social change and egalitarian attitudes. By this logic, conservative people—compared to those scoring low on conservatism—might prefer to travel back to the past, to the “good old days.”

To test these ideas, Ettlin and Hertwig first asked their research participants whether they would prefer to travel to the past or to the future as an observer (so that they couldn’t also have the opportunity to change the course of history). The research participants then completed standard measures of self-perceived courageousness and risk propensity, as well as a scale that measures political conservatism.

First, there were no statistical differences in overall time travel preference: 47% of the sample wished to travel to the past compared to 53% who wanted to journey ahead to the future. Second, when examining all factors at once, the authors found that there was a trend such that age was linked to a desire to travel to the future rather than the past, as was self-perceived courageousness. Surprisingly, political conservatism was also associated with a preference for future travel, at least weakly. The researchers also analyzed the reasons behind time travel preference and found that 11% wanted to relive a particular episode of the past, 29% wanted to travel to the past to gain some strategic information that could be used in the present, 5% wanted to learn about the future of their children or grandchildren, and 41% wanted to experience great cultural or religious events in either the past or future, and an additional 14% of responses weren’t classifiable.

This initial examination into time travel preferences was obviously exploratory, and thus the results need to be interpreted cautiously until they are replicated in experimental settings. Nonetheless, they provide fascinating insights into the psychology of time travel as well as the preferences of older adults: rather than being stuck in the past, older participants preferred to see ahead to the future. The findings also open up the door to many other possibilities: Are those who desire to travel to the future also the ones who fear death the most? Could prompting mental future time travel assuage such concerns? Along similar lines, does a preference for past time travel correlate with a craving to recapture great moments in time? Could encouraging past time travel alleviate nostalgic longings, or could it intensify them?

Hal E. Hershfield, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at New York University's Stern School of Business.

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On the campus essay: learning to travel through time with my astrophysics professor.

For 35 years I’ve been traveling through time with the Princeton professor who showed that time travel is possible.

It’s 1981. I’m a senior in the astrophysics department, choosing a topic for my undergraduate thesis. I’m in the Peyton Hall office of J. Richard Gott III *73, an astrophysicist who’s building a reputation as one of the best and quirkiest teachers at Princeton. I’m 20 years old, he’s 34.

Professor Gott is a native of Louisville, Ky. He studied math and physics at Harvard before getting his Ph.D. in astrophysics at Princeton. He has a strong Kentucky drawl and a special enthusiasm for Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, the equations that link space and time and gravity. He leans forward in his chair and fervently talks about curvature tensors and spacetime metrics. And as I listen to him, I start to feel the same excitement.

He finds a recent issue of Scientific American and opens the magazine. “Here’s something interesting. It’s about Flatland, a hypothetical universe with only two spatial dimensions. It has length and width, but no height. You could do a thesis on that.”

I’m confused. “Flatland?”

“You could figure out how general relativity would work in a universe with only two spatial dimensions, plus the dimension of time.”

He draws a spacetime diagram to make things clearer. The vertical dimension in this diagram is the dimension of time. The top of the page is the future, and the bottom is the past. Every object in our universe follows a “world line” in this diagram, moving left and right through the spatial dimensions but also traveling inexorably upward, toward the future.

That meeting in Peyton Hall is the beginning of our journey. My world line and Professor Gott’s run close and parallel for the next six months as I struggle with the mathematics of relativity. I finally derive a solution for Flatland and rush to Dr. Gott’s office. He smiles and gives me the highest compliment that one theorist can give another: “This solution is non-trivial!”

The theory of relativity, we discover, would work very differently in Flatland than it does in our universe. There would be no gravitational attraction between massive objects, and yet those objects still would alter the geometry of the spacetime around them. It’s an interesting result. Dr. Gott and I co-author a research paper that’s published in a somewhat esoteric journal called General Relativity and Gravitation.

After I graduate from Princeton, though, I stop studying astrophysics. I fall in love with poetry and get a master’s degree in creative writing. Eventually I become a journalist. My world line diverges from Professor Gott’s.

But then something remarkable happens. My Princeton education isn’t over yet. Our world lines come back together.

It’s 1998. Oddly enough, I’m now an editor at Scientific American. My wife and I go to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City to hear a lecture by Dr. Gott. He’s made an amazing discovery: Under extraordinary circumstances, the theory of relativity allows for time travel to the past. The circumstances involve cosmic strings, infinitely long strands of high-density material that may have been created in the first moments of our universe’s history. If cosmic strings really exist — astronomers haven’t observed any yet — Professor Gott believes they could be used to build a time machine.

With his usual enthusiasm, he explains to the audience in the lecture hall how the time machine would work. First, you’d have to find two cosmic strings that are zooming past each other at nearly the speed of light. Then you’d jump into a spaceship and steer around the pair of strings in a tight circle. Because the strings radically change the geometry of the surrounding spacetime, the rocket would return to your starting point at a time before you embarked on the journey. Upon your arrival, you could shake hands with your slightly younger self and reassure him or her that the trip will be successful. Your world line has twisted into a closed curve, allowing you to loop back to an event in your past.

But wait, Dr. Gott tells the audience, there’s more! Researchers have discovered other methods of time travel allowed by Einstein’s equations, including scenarios involving wormholes — shortcuts through spacetime, like the one shown in the movie Interstellar — and exotic vacuum states. “I’m not talking about a Hoover vacuum,” Gott says passionately in his characteristic drawl. “I’m talking about a negative-energy quantum vacuum!” Even stranger, it’s possible that our universe began as a closed time loop, a vacuum state that whirled back and forth in time and simultaneously sent a branch of spacetime into the future, where it became our modern-day cosmos.

This cosmological model is appealing to physicists and philosophers because it cleverly answers an age-old question: What started the universe? If our cosmos branched off from a closed time loop, then the universe has no beginning, because every moment in time is preceded by an earlier moment. There’s no need to imagine a cosmic birth that created everything out of nothing, because it didn’t happen. Instead, the universe created itself.

These ideas about time travel and cosmology dazzle the audience at the museum. After the lecture, several people rush toward the stage to talk to Professor Gott. My wife pushes me forward. “Go on, say hello to him.”

Researchers have discovered other methods of time travel allowed by Einstein’s equations, including scenarios involving wormholes — shortcuts through spacetime, like the one shown in the movie Interstellar — and exotic vacuum states. “I’m not talking about a Hoover vacuum,” Gott says passionately in his characteristic drawl. “I’m talking about a negative-energy quantum vacuum!”

I shake my head. “No, he won’t remember me.” But I go to the stage anyway and say hello.

He smiles. “Of course, I remember you! That research we did together? On Flatland? That led to my work on cosmic strings.”

As it turns out, the spacetime around a cosmic string is very similar to the distorted geometry around massive objects in Flatland. When Dr. Gott tells me this, I sense a strange tug in my own world line. I’m looping across time.

Einstein, in one of his last letters: “The distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion.”

It’s 2007. I’m having lunch with Professor Gott at a Chinese restaurant near Princeton. We’ve stayed in touch over the past decade; we follow each other’s work and occasionally discuss the latest science news. The relationship is incredibly rewarding. I feel as if I’ve enrolled in an open-ended astrophysics course that has no final exam but keeps giving me credits.

I arranged this lunch so we can discuss a manuscript I’ve written. It’s my first novel, Final Theory, a thriller about Einstein and apocalyptic physics. Dr. Gott has scribbled comments on dozens of Post-It notes. He points at the novel, which has several physicists in its cast of characters. “Well, I recognize which character is me,” he says. “And I know which one is you. So who should play us in the movie?”

He has a soft spot for science-fiction movies, especially any film that features time travel. After we go over the casting choices, Dr. Gott corrects several mistakes I made in the first draft of the novel. In one scene, I put the wrong constellations in the summer sky. That would’ve been a humiliating error for a former astrophysics major.

It’s 2015. I’m in Professor Gott’s office again, but now my 16-year-old son, Tommy, is there too. He’s thinking about applying to Princeton and wants to meet my favorite teacher.

Dr. Gott is generous with his time. He gives Tommy a tour of the astrophysics department. He tells stories about the Intel Science Talent Search, the contest for which he served as a judge for many years. (He was a contestant when he was in high school, winning second place in 1965.) Then he switches gears and talks about space exploration and the War of the Worlds broadcast, the famous Orson Welles radio play that terrified the country in 1938 by describing a Martian invasion of New Jersey. He says he recently celebrated the anniversary of the broadcast by visiting Grover’s Mill, the site of the fictional Martian landing. It’s just a few miles from Princeton.

He keeps us enthralled for almost two hours. After we leave Peyton Hall, Tommy is thoroughly intimidated. “If you have to be that smart to get into Princeton, I don’t have a chance,” he says.

I reassure him by pointing out that very few people in the world are as smart as Professor Gott.

It’s 2016. In one of the most important discoveries of the century, scientists detect gravitational waves for the first time, providing the best evidence yet for the theory of relativity. And at the end of the spring semester, Dr. Gott will retire from the Princeton faculty. I’m 55 years old, he’s 69.

I’m glad we stayed in touch. I tell all my friends and fellow alumni that they should look up their former professors. It’s like another kind of time travel.

And you don’t even need any cosmic strings. 

Emil Friedman *73

Is Prof. Gott's time travel example two-way? After going back to the past can he return to the future? What about the paradox proposed by Larry Niven? If a method of traveling to the past were discovered, would somebody go back and do something to prevent the discovery? (One-way time travel to the future is clearly possible. All of us do it continuously.)   Nicholas Meyler '81 

The key problem in time-travel is traveling to the past. Travel to the future is already a known phenomenon (according to Relativity and the Lorentz contraction equations). A sufficiently fast rocket, near light-speed, could easily travel to the future, while the astronaut onboard ages less due to the time-dilation effect.

So, Gott's solution is about time-travel to the past, primarily. Would a paradox result? According to the "many worlds" hypothesis of Hugh Everett III (a Princeton PhD), each time-travel event creates a new universe, so that paradoxes need not exist.

When we refer to "time-travel," we are mostly referring to events that are spatio-temporally discontinuous, so not quite like just aging, although I think that counts, too.

The classical "paradox" in time-travel is called "the grandfather paradox" (i.e. could I go back in time and kill my grandfather before I was born?) ... If so, how would I get born in the first place? Everett's solution is that yes, you can go kill your grandfather, but you wouldn't be in the same Universe or "time-line" anymore, and you obviously have already been born, so you wouldn't simply "disappear," like the silly "Back to The Future" photograph.

Whether paradoxes really would ensue is somewhat dubious, though, even if time-travel were to the same Universe as it started from. Kip Thorne did extensive "thought experiments" that proved time-travel to the past was possible, with some degree of interaction. Scientists in Australia have also found similar results modeling sending particles back through wormholes, where the particles have the opportunity to interact with their previous "selves." No paradoxes arose, from what I understand.   Nicholas Meyler ’81

"Time Travel in Einstein's Universe" was an excellent book, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I was under the impression, though (and a bit sadly), that Gerard t'Hooft had shown that Gott's proposed time-machine can't work because it would "collapse the Universe".

Also, given that in Relativity (which might be true), even if two cosmic strings are rushing past each other, each nearly at the speed of light, that doesn't "add up" to faster-than-light relative motion between the two strings... since the relative speed measured from one point on one string to one point on the other string still cannot exceed lightspeed. So, my question is what mathematics justifies this contention, and what would be the slowest two cosmic strings could be moving past each other and still produce the required exotic space-time effects for a looping rocket trip to travel backwards in time?

Has Gott done any research on the idea of spinning cosmic strings (approximating a Tipler cylinder)? This might be of some interest...

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Collective Mental Time Travel Can Influence the Future

We’re often told to “be here now.” Yet the mind is rarely tethered in place. We take mental trips to our past, revisiting what happened yesterday or when we were children, or we project into an imagined future: tomorrow’s dinner date, the trajectory of our career at age 50.

Rather than a diversion from the norm of mindful presence, this tendency to internally visit other time lines, called “mental time travel,” is common; young adults, for example, think about their future an average of 59 times a day. Psychologists have suggested that this ability to time travel from the confines of our own heads is a fundamental aspect of what it means to be human.

The past and future are not locations that remain the same regardless of who is visiting and when. The way we envision our past or future is ever-changing, and the construction of these scenarios has an impact on what we do and how we think in the present. Until recently, the study of mental time travel largely focused on individuals and their personal histories. But this doesn’t reflect the social nature of our lives. Identities are comprised of groups that nestle into one another. We are part of our families and friend circles, occupational networks, countries and nations, and ethnic groups. The study of mental time travel is starting to reflect this: When we travel through time, we don’t always go alone.

Research on “collective mental time travel” shows that the way we imagine the collective future or past also impacts the present. It can sway attitudes toward policy decisions and laws, as well as how aligned people feel with their country or existing systems. It can affect a person’s willingness to engage in prosocial behaviors, like voting, donating, or activism. Because of this, collective mental time travel is more than just a neat cognitive trick—it provides an opportunity to be more intentional about how we represent the collective past and future. 

In the 1980s, psychologist Endel Tulving proposed that humans have the ability to relive their past and pre-experience the future, theorizing that the same memory mechanisms were used for both. This was supported by case studies with amnesiacs: One man, “K.C.,” had brain lesions that affected his ability to retain personal memories, like a visit he’d taken to a family lake house. This patient couldn’t imagine going there in the future, despite knowing that his family owned the house.

More recent brain imaging has supported Tulving’s theory by showing that similar networks are activated when remembering the personal past and personal future, said Karl Szpunar, an associate professor of psychology and director of the Memory Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University. Based on this evidence, some scientists think that we imagine the future by recombining past experiences—this is called the “constructed episodic simulation hypothesis.”

For the collective past and future, the story may be more complex. Is our collective future simply made up of fragments of the collective past? Intriguingly, when people with damage to their hippocampus, a brain region involved in personal memory, are asked about collective future events, like “What environmental concerns will the world face over the coming decade?” they are able to come up with answers. Even though their ability to mentally time travel into their personal futures was compromised, the ability to imagine events affecting a group’s future was intact. More work on this is needed, but as Spzunar and his colleague wrote, “The capacity to engage in collective future thought appears to rely on cognitive processes distinct from those involved in individual or personal future thinking.”

Joel Khalili

Reece Rogers

Brian Barrett

The collective past likely has an influence on the collective future, but only to a point, says Meymune Topcu, a visiting scholar at The New School. She’s coauthor of a recent review chapter on collective mental time travel, in which she examined numerous cases of people collectively “visiting” the past and future and looked at whether they felt positively or negatively about their mental representations and how specific the content of their time travel was.

She found that past events can influence what people imagine to happen in the collective future, but there isn’t necessarily a complete overlap. Imagined collective futures can also be less specific than memories of the collective past, Topcu said. Additionally, when we think about our own futures, we tend to have an optimism bias, but when people are asked to think about the future of their countries, they often focus more on potentially worrisome , rather than potentially exciting, possibilities. (These findings have not been found to be culturally universal: Some newer research with Chinese participants has shown that such positive and negative biases are not present in those study groups.)

On an individual level, thinking about the future is correlated with specific actions or attitudes. Studies from Hal Hershfield, a psychologist at UCLA who studies the effects of time perception, and his colleagues, have found that people who relate more to their future selves make more future-oriented decisions, like saving money for later, and have higher levels of well-being over a 10-year period. Hershfield has also asked people about their conception of how long the present is. The longer they thought “ right now ” lasted, the fewer emotions they felt about the future. People who said that the present ended sooner were more likely to make future-oriented decisions. Having a future time perspective can also predict pro-environmental attitudes, like favoring and participating in more sustainable behaviors.

If how you think about the future or present can be a guiding influence, it’s a short leap to envisioning how collective pasts and futures might be manipulated for various means. Jeremy Yamashiro, an assistant professor of psychology at UC Santa Cruz, said that rather than creating hard and fast rules for the best way to represent the past and the future, he’s become more sensitive to the ways people use representations in strategic ways . “It’s much more, ‘How are people using that in order to convince you of what they’re trying to convince you of?’” He said. The collective future probably isn’t based only on the building blocks of the past, but also cultural narratives , Yamashiro said.

Those narratives can have immediate and practical policy ramifications. In 2014 , social and cultural psychologist Contance de Saint-Laurent analyzed the parliamentary debates on immigration in France and found two dominant narratives for how left-wing and right-wing politicians thought about the country’s past.

The left saw the past as “a constant struggle between humanists and their adversaries,” while the right saw the central tenet of French history as the “social contract that enables co-existence in society.” Because of the way these groups viewed the past, de Saint-Laurent wrote, people on the left were more willing to see the future as an opportunity to address colonial crimes, while the others would only accept immigrants who adhered to the social contract of the country.

A person’s current reality also affects how much they focus on the future. Johanna Peetz, a social psychologist at Carleton University, has found a link between future thinking and the economic index of countries and their general quality of life. If a country’s economic index was stable or decreasing, and quality of life was declining, people did not want to look toward the future.

We could, however, think of some manipulations being wielded for good. Topcu thinks that collective future thinking could play a role in addressing intergroup conflicts. In one study , people who lived in the European Union were given different descriptions of the EU. One was an excerpt that mentioned the common heritage of European societies, the other was a narrative focusing on how the EU was a project for the future. Then the people played a game in which they had to choose to cooperate with other participants. When people saw the EU as a future-oriented project, rather than one based in the past, they were more likely to play nice.

“I’m just speculating, but if we ask people to imagine a future in a different way, or simply imagining a future where there’s more peace and cooperation between these two groups, it could have an effect on whether they would be more willing to change the present situation,” Topcu said.

This approach could be applied at a more global scale. In 2018, researchers asked people to write about their vision of the best possible overall society. People who imagined utopia-like futures ended up being less satisfied with the status quo and were less likely to justify current systems. People asked to engage in utopian thinking also reported being more willing to participate in individual and collective action to attain that future.

But the type of utopia mattered. In a follow-up study , participants were asked to imagine either a “green utopia” composed of an “ecologically friendly society that champions sustainable efficiency” or a “sci-fi utopia,” where technological advancement and material efficiency dominated. Both utopias were seen as positive, but those who imagined the green utopia were more willing to participate in social change or report that they would donate to a nonprofit. The authors speculated that it had to do with agency—those who invested in a sci-fi future envisioned technology solving every problem and may have felt less able to bring about that positive future.

This suggests that proposing a future on Mars, for example, might unintentionally lead to less action in the present than collectively imagining a different kind of future would. “When we think about techno-fixes, it’s couched in a narrative of progress,” said Piotr Szpunar, a professor in the Communication Department at the University at Albany: “a narrative that technology continuously gets better, and at the same time, that society continuously gets better, or more equitable.” This can happen within nations too, as with the story of American exceptionalism. “There’s this idea that regardless of what happens, we’re still progressing,” he said. William Hirst, professor and cochair of psychology at The New School for Social Research, described the often rigid relationship between memory and history as “mnemonic inertia,” when certain stories become sticky and have outsized weight in terms of how we think about the present and future.

The future can also modify how we view the past, a concept that psychologist Ignacio Brescó de Luna called “prolepsis,” or when “imagined futures are brought into the present by means of particular ways of reconstructing the past.” In 2018, transdisciplinary scholar Séamus A. Power interviewed people engaged in water protests in Ireland. He argued that a driving reason for their collective action was imagining a dystopic future in which water was privatized, an imagined future based on remembering past cases of privatization in Ireland.

“There is a continuous looping from the past to the future and back again, always converging on the focal point of the present,” Power wrote. There’s room for flexibility—the most important lesson currently from collective mental time travel might be how dynamic an interaction there is between our notions of future, present, and past.

No matter how we use it, collective mental time travel ultimately challenges the objective reality of our past and present. The English philosopher C.D. Broad proposed the “growing block theory of time,” which says that only the past and present are real, and the future is not. As the future becomes the present, it is added on to the “growing block of reality.” Collective mental time travel reminds us that all remembrances of the past are reconstructions to some extent, and our present is continuously being informed by the way we imagine the future and conceive of the past.

“When you can change the narrative of the past, it’s going to change the way you conceive of the future too,” Hirst said. We won’t ever be able to escape this relationship, but we can seek a better understanding of how our perceptions are influenced by mental time travel, and how the collective past and future can be tools for building a better present.

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How to write a travel essay

November 22, 2023 by Josh Collins Leave a Comment

Travel essays and short notes allow you to dive deep into the memories and share your experience with readers. If written well, readers can explore new places without traveling or get inspired to explore new things. The location you have visited may contain many things to discuss: architecture, sightseeing, nature, culture, and much more. How can you tell about it in a short essay? Whether you are planning to write an essay, blog post, or another type of writing – all the tips below will help you craft an appealing paper.

Understand your goals

Before writing a travel essay: 1. Define the main idea you want to stick to in your writing. If you have a specific word limit, you may be unable to cover everything you wish to write about. 2. Check whether the professor asked you to cover specific experiences during your trip or stick to a more descriptive writing style. 3. If you are free of what to write about, make up a list of things you wish to focus on.

Understanding your goals will help you see the big picture and write the text within a limited time. If you were assigned to write an essay about your travel and can’t meet the deadline or have no ideas, you can get punctual help with essay writing from EssayShark .

Write catchy introduction How did your travel start? What were your plans? You can start with a quote about adventure or just begin your story by planning or arriving at the destination place. For example, here are some starters for travel essays: ● Who has said traveling is pricy? ● Don’t let the routine bore you; add a bit of spice with traveling to your everyday life. ● And the adventure begins!

Experiment with various approaches to engage the reader. You can put this step at the end when you finish the first draft, when the overall idea will be more transparent.

Add vivid descriptions First, think about whether you can attach images to your essay to make it more appealing to the reader and support your adventures with real photos. An additional illustration can create a unique atmosphere that will transfer the reader to the place you have visited.

Use a more relaxed writing style and understand that a travel essay is not a formal academic paper but more personal writing. Use the language you use every day, and avoid cliches and slang to sound more natural and appealing to the reader.

Focus on several ideas What if you have no solid experience in traveling? Or maybe you haven’t seen anything special to talk about. In fact, even a small town has its own spirit and local sightseeing that, you can tell in your essay. For example, you can discuss local cuisine the weather, and share specific descriptions of the places.

Tell the simple story The main aim of every travel essay is to help the reader wear your shoes and imagine what you have experienced during the trip. Describe your emotions and experience in detail to help the reader feel like they have already visited the place. Avoid listing attractions or telling the traveling process step by step. Share your thoughts, and use creative expressions to keep your natural flow.

Ensure your travel story has a standard format and contains an introduction, main body, and conclusion. Don’t interrupt your writing in the middle of an idea; wrap up everything you have said in a meaningful conclusion.

Wrapping Up In general, you can approach traveling essays from different points of view. Grab the reader’s attention with an exciting intro, add vivid details, and focus on several aspects of your journey to keep them reading. Share your experience in a storytelling manner, and your writing won’t be unnoticed.

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With the decline in air travel from the pandemic, the classic road trip has become more popular in America.

Here are 8 ways travel will change after the pandemic

What will travel look like in the future? We asked the experts.

With coronavirus cases continuing to spike in America and abroad, travelers with a United States passport remain grounded. To date, just nine countries are open to Americans without restrictions. If Belarus, Serbia , Zambia or any of the other six countries on that list aren’t in the cards, then travelers itching to get on an international flight will have to wait.

How long is still unknown. Elizabeth Becker, author of Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism , notes that the pandemic “ decimated ” the $8 trillion global travel industry overnight. “Those essential pillars of 21st-century global travel—open borders, open destinations, and visa-free travel—won’t return in the short term or even medium term,” she says.

What does that mean for the future of travel? Despite the turbulence, experts are seeing blue skies. Bruce Poon Tip, author of Unlearn: The Year the Earth Stood Still and the founder of travel company G Adventures , says not only will we travel again, we’ll do it better. “I still believe travel can be the biggest distributor of wealth the world has ever seen,” he says. “This pause gives us the gift of time to consider how we can travel more consciously.”

From a renewed commitment to sustainable tourism to creative ways to globetrot from home, here’s how travel authors, bloggers, and podcasters are navigating.

( Related: These 25 destinations inspire future journeys and remind us why we love to travel .)

Sustainability will be a driving force

Tourists crowd St. ​Mark’s Square in Venice, Italy, in 2013. In the wake of the pandemic, experts predict there will be more interest in visiting less-crowded places.

One silver lining of the pandemic? Consumers are doubling down on sustainability . Becker predicts travelers will take on the role of “concerned citizens” demanding responsible travel policies. The industry will respond with active measures to prioritize a healthy world over profit margins. “Don’t be surprised if countries mandate ‘fly-free days’ and other measures to control climate change,” she says.

• Nat Geo Expeditions

Take action: Reduce your carbon footprint by purchasing offsets with companies such as Cool Effect and by staying at certified green hotels. Check sites like Book Different , which rates accommodations for eco-friendliness.

( Related: Here’s how Greece is rethinking its once bustling tourism industry .)

Our journeys will become more inclusive

The Black Lives Matter movement has brought the issue of representation to light in all industries, including travel. That’s overdue, says Sarah Greaves-Gabbadon . The award-winning journalist and TV host says she hopes the industry is moving toward meaningful change but worries that any change may be short-lived. “When the pandemic is past and the hashtags are no longer trending, will industry gatekeepers still be eager to attract, cater to, and celebrate travelers of color?” she writes in an email. “I’m cautiously optimistic but not completely convinced.”

Black Travel Alliance ’s Martinique Lewis feels the industry is moving in the right direction and remains hopeful. She notes that companies are addressing the needs of diverse customers and says it’s about time. “For the first time they are considering what a trans female goes through not only when choosing what bathroom to go in at a restaurant, but when she checks into a hotel and her license shows a different person,” says Lewis. “Now plus-size travelers wanting to surf and scuba but can’t because the lack of wetsuits in their size are being acknowledged. Now blind travelers who still want to experience tours and extreme sports while on holiday are thought of.”

Take action: Visit one of the nearly 200 living history museums in the U.S., where historic interpreters portray figures from the past. They shed light on painful issues (such as racism in America) and hidden narratives (such as those of people of color, whose stories have been suppressed).

Small communities will play a bigger role

Travelers can make a difference in small towns that were already struggling economically before the pandemic. Caz Makepeace of Y Travel Blog says she and her family have always traveled slowly to lesser-known areas, “rather than racing through destinations.” Now she’s supporting these places by patronizing local businesses and donating to nonprofits.

Kate Newman of Travel for Difference suggests travelers focus on “ global south ” or developing countries that depend on tourism. “We need to diversify our locations to avoid mass tourism and focus on the places that really need it,” she says. “Seeing so many communities suffer during COVID-19 has brought [this issue] to light.”

Take action: Turn to sustainable tourism educational and advocacy nonprofit Impact Travel Alliance to learn how to empower locals and protect the environment.

We’ll seek quality over quantity

High-mileage travelers are putting more thought into their bucket lists. “COVID-19 has allowed me to rethink how and why I travel,” says Erick Prince of The Minority Nomad . “It’s given me the freedom to explore travel projects for passion instead of the paycheck.” Rather than focusing on paid gigs, the blogger, who lives in Thailand, says he’ll be embarking on a self-funded project to highlight off-the-beaten-track provinces in his adopted country.

Eulanda Osagiede, of Hey Dip Your Toes In , is putting the breaks on international trips, citing travel as a privilege many take for granted. “Privilege comes in many forms, and the act of recognizing our travel-related ones have called us to think about traveling more intentionally and less often—if ever the world begins to look similar to its pre-pandemic days.”

Take action: Check the Transformational Travel Council for resources and recommendations on operators who can help organize meaningful journeys.

The road trip will kick into high gear

For many, road trips may be the only feasible option for travel right now, and frequent fliers like Gabby Beckford of Packs Light are revving up. Driving across state lines can be just as exciting as flying across international borders; it’s about the mindset. “Road-tripping has shown me that the core of travel—curiosity, exposure to newness, and wonder—[is] a perspective, not a destination,” she says.

Take action : Plan a coronavirus-conscious trip to Colorado, home to superlative stargazing sites —and what may become the world’s largest Dark Sky reserve.

Some high-mileage travelers say they plan to focus on meaningful experiences at out-of-the-way areas, like Chimney Tops in Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains National Park .

( Related: Check out these eight epic drives across America .)

Travel advisors will become essential

Conde Nast Traveller sustainability editor Juliet Kinsman predicts a shift to booking travel through agents and established operators, noting their invaluable knowledge and industry connections. “I think what 2020 has shown and taught us is the expertise and financial protection of booking through a travel agent often outweighs the amount you pay in commission,” she says. Additionally, she hopes that consumers will look to agents who specialize in the environment. “Those who care about where they send their customers can intuitively cut through greenwash and really ensure every link in the supply chain is an honorable one,” she says.

Related: Amazing architecture you can see from your car window

Take action: Find a travel advisor : The American Society of Travel Advisors maintains a database that allows travelers to search by destination, type of journey (such as eco-tourism or genealogy), and cohort (such as LGBTQ+ travelers). Virtuoso , a network of advisors specializing in luxury travel, can help with good deals, convenient itineraries, and tailored experiences.

We’ll appreciate staying closer to home

Some are discovering the benefits of travel even at home. Blogger Jessie Festa of Epicure & Culture and Jessie on a Journey normally travels internationally once a month. These days, online cultural cooking classes, games, and virtual experiences are helping her “to keep the spirit of travel alive by considering the feelings that travel elicits,” she says. Exchanging postcards with her extended travel community is another “beautiful way to ‘experience’ travel again, safely,” she adds.

“When we compare everything to being locked up indefinitely in our respective towers, a walk to the park can feel like travel,” says blogger Chris Mitchell of Traveling Mitch . “Now people are willing to see the magic in a meal on a patio at a restaurant down the street.”

Take action: Get outside, says the Norwegian concept “ friluftsliv ,” an idea of outdoor living that promises to make the pandemic’s colder months more bearable.

( Related: Here’s why walking is the ideal pandemic activity .)

Planning trips will become joyful again

Although some people are making the best of being grounded, this difficult period is reminding them that travel is important for boosting mental health and personal growth. There’s research to back it up. A 2013 survey of 483 U.S. adults found that travel improves empathy, energy, attention, and focus. Planning a trip is just as effective—a 2014 Cornell study showed that looking forward to travel substantially increases happiness, more than anticipating buying material goods.

Joanna Penn can attest to the healing benefits of both. The U.K.-based author and podcaster behind The Creative Penn and Books and Travel normally travels to research her books. “For me my writing life is all about what I learned when I travel,” she said in a recent podcast, “the ideas that come from being someplace new.” Her future trips will include walking the Camino de Santiago in 2022. Studying maps and determining a route makes her feel like she’s working toward a real goal. “I can expand my comfort zone without too much stress, especially if I accept that things might get canceled,” she said.

Take action: Plan a trip now, with inspiration from this essay on why travel should be considered an essential human activity.

Related Topics

• CORONAVIRUS
• SUSTAINABLE TOURISM
• MENTAL HEALTH
• VOLUNTOURISM

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How To Write a Good Travel Essay

Home / Blog / How To Write A Good Travel Essay - Guide With Examples

Introduction

“Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”

-Gustav Flaubert

Packing the duffel with the bare essentials and hopping into the car, getting behind the steering wheel and driving with no perfect destination in mind – we all dream to live such a life, don't we? Travelling to unseen places and exploring what it has to offer can be an enriching experience. However beautiful can travel be as an experience, writing a travelling essay can be quite a challenge. It may seem easy to come up with the ideas that you want to include in the essay but putting them into coherent sentences can be difficult. Your words should be impactful enough to be able to sweep the readers off their feet and take them on the cliff or make them feel the saline breeze on a beach.  

A perfect travel essay must reflect the journey and highlight the little-known facts about the region. It should be infused with the character and culture of the place. If you are feeling stymied while writing a travel essay, then we have some brilliant tips for you that can make the task considerably easy for you.

8 tips for an outstanding essay on travelling

Here are 8 tips that you can cash on to produce a winning travelling essay:

• Be specific with the destination

Before you choose a topic for your travel essay, keep the time spent in the location in mind. If your trip is just for a couple of days, then do not make the mistake of writing about an entire city. Think it out practically – is it possible to travel through a city in just a few days? Take for instance your essay is about London. It is quite an insurmountable task to be able to cover all the distance even in a week. So stick to a particular destination so that you can include the nuances and minutest details of the place to paint a picture in the reader’s mind with your words. 

• Less guide, more exploring

Also, the destination need not be about an exotic locale. It can be a story about an idyllic rustic location in the suburb of the teeming city. It can be about a cottage up on the hills with just the view of snowy valleys and iced peaks. Your words should give the sense of exploring and not touring. The essay should not be like a guide. It should be a view of the location through your lens.

• Know the location like the back of your hand

Before starting to write a travel essay, do your research. A travel essay isn’t a made-up story so there should not be any fake information. Readers will be looking for more than just the necessary information about the must-visit tourist attractions. So you need to go beyond the surface and include more about the history of the place. Just do not write about the restaurants – talk about the cuisine of the place and the story behind it, if any. To get into the innermost recesses of the location, you can speak to the residents of the area. To bring richness in your travel essay, you must reveal another side of the destination.

• Include the nitty-gritty

The key to an impressive travel essay is to be able to break down the location into kernels and write the core details about them. As mentioned earlier, so not just write about the tourist attractions and restaurants in the destination. Write about the lesser talked streets and unknown landmarks and the history behind them. If the place is known for its delicacies, write about how the cuisine has evolved and who had started it. From quaint bookstores to ice cream parlours to run-down shabby pubs – shed light to such nuances to bring your essay to life. You can even mention the negative things that you have faced in the place – like irregular transport modes or impolite locals. These little details will help you make your essay more impactful.

• Be creative with the writing style

Since a travel essay is more like an anecdote, there is no specific format to write it. Therefore, a travel essay gives you the scope of setting your foot into the unchartered areas of creativity. You have got the creative freedom to write what you want. You can study how the natives of the locale speak and learn some of the basic words and phrases they use. To put them into writing you can read the local newspaper to get the pulse of the city you are in. Using the colloquial lingo can help the reader get a closer peek into the lives of the people living in the place. It will reflect a slice of how they live their way of life. Your words should be simple and yet impactful to portray and not just merely narrate. Touch every bit of the rust in the roof to make the reader feel like they are on the same journey with you.

• Make it personal

The travel essay is your story. So add some personal experience in the story and at the same time do not make it self-indulgent. Include stories that can resonate with all your readers. Your experiences should be able to bring the reader back to the travel destination and connect him with the place. It should be the perfect blend of narration of the experiences you had while on the trip along with a vivid description of the place. To achieve the balance, write your essay in first person perspective to give a real touch to the story. Include the most interesting bits that will help the reader connect with you. You can even include the quotes of natives living in the area you had visited.

• Start with a captivating catch

Like every essay, the introduction is the key to make it an impressive read. The opening should be capturing enough to attract the reader’s attention. It should leave an impact and should make them want to go on reading the piece. Start with an unknown fact about the place and leave it hanging from the cliff. Use a tone of suspense to excite the readers to keep them guessing about the contents of the essay.

• Make it vivid with images

For certain places, words may fall short in being able to explain the exact description of a place. You cannot describe how the sky looked with the mountains seemingly touching the clouds or the horizon fading beyond the sea. Certain things cannot be explained in words – like the color of the sky or the water! This is where pictures come in! Providing real images of the place in between can help the readers stay connected. Vivid photos can also make the readers understand the story better by bringing them closer to it. So make sure you take breathtaking pictures of the place you are writing about. The images will help your essay stay in the readers’ mind longer.

With the above tips, we are sure you will be able to write an excellent travelling essay  that will impress your professor and fetch you a good grade.

And if you are still unsure about putting these to use, then below is a winning sample to show you how it is done!

Travelling essay sample

I have visited London several times, and yet it is amazing how I find something new to explore every time I visit the capital city. My visit last autumn too did not fail to surprise me. With the hustle and bustle and the rich royal history, London city has a lot to offer. Since I just had a few days to spare, I wanted to make the best out of this trip.

Although vast and sprawling, I decided to visit most of the city on foot this time. Now since in my previous visits I had seen most of the tourist-y attractions already, I wanted to take the path less travelled this time to discover the hidden gems of the city. The last time I had been to London, I had missed out on the chance to visit the chock full of literature and history that awaited me in the Shakespeare Globe Theatre. Being a student of literature, visiting the place where the Bard of Avon once enacted the plays he wrote was a spellbinding moment. And guess what? I also caught a staging of the Macbeth before I left the place. Before heading towards the Hyde Park tube station, I grabbed some of London’s famous Fish ‘n’ Chips from the oldest food market of the city, the Borough Market. From Hyde Park to Tower Hill in under fifteen minutes by Tube, I began exploring the Tower of London. It was there that I heard a guard speaking about where he hailed from. A quick conversation with Peter, I had gotten intrigued to know more about his village – Suffolk in Lavenham. I asked him how to get there and Peter, being the quintessential helping guide that Londoners are known to be, told me that I could either take a car from central London. Or I could wait for the next day and take the train from Liverpool to Sudbury and then take the bus route 753 and reach in around two hours. Having nothing to do, I spent that day in the British Museum and walking on Oxford Street.

The next morning, I started my journey to the quaint village of Suffolk. I had picked up a book about the village where I learned that the village had once housed Henry III in 1257. And a bonus for all the Harry Potter fans – the village also starred in ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’ as Godric’s Hollow where Hermoine and Harry are seen to be visiting Bathilda Bagshot. On reaching the village, the first thing that grabbed my attention was the picture-perfect silhouette of prosperous medieval England with all the half-timbered houses. The lime-washed and brightly coloured buildings added an idyllic element to the village with the De Vere House standing out from the rest. Adding to the rustic touch was the fifteenth-century St Peter Church with its soaring height of a 141ft tower. The autumn breeze welcomed me as I walked on the leaf-covered high streets. I saw some young guns cycling around in a park and called out to them for directions. My stay for the trip was an Air BnB home-stay where I had to put up with an elderly couple – the Havishams. I still remember how on reaching the gate of the house, I had caught a waft of crumpets and hot scones. After an exchange of banalities followed by me gorging on the scones, I had found out about the hidden gems from Mr Havisham who happened to be quite a cheerful talker. He told me what a must-visit Hadley’s was when in Suffolk. I had then set out with a local map to find the hidden gem. On reaching I had found that Hadley’s was a cutesy ice cream shop, almost run down, run by an old lady. Here Rebecca told me how the ice cream parlour was opened back in the 1850s and was still known for their hand-made sorbets.

Like the sorbet, my stay in Suffolk had been a sweet experience – a trip of revelation. The tour – with all the lonely walks – had in an inexplicable way helped me to get my perspectives right. It isn’t the exotic locales and the flight above the clouds that make travelling my drug. Rather, it is little but beautiful discoveries like Suffolk that feed my wanderlust. Thank you, London. Thank you for being a wonderful experience, once again.   

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Write a Good Travel Essay. Please.

Kathleen Boardman

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Editor’s Note: We know that many of you are looking for help writing travel experience essays for school or simply writing about a trip for your friends or family. To inspire you and help you write your next trip essay—whether it’s an essay about a trip with family or simply a way to remember your best trip ever (so far)—we enlisted the help of Professor Kathleen Boardman, whose decades of teaching have helped many college students learn the fine art of autobiography and life writing. Here’s advice on how to turn a simple “my best trip” essay into a story that will inspire others to explore the world.

Welcome home! Now that you’re back from your trip, you’d like to share it with others in a travel essay. You’re a good writer and a good editor of your work, but you’ve never tried travel writing before. As your potential reader, I have some advice and some requests for you as you write your travel experience essay.

Trip Essays: What to Avoid

Please don’t tell me everything about your trip. I don’t want to know your travel schedule or the names of all the castles or restaurants you visited. I don’t care about the plane trip that got you there (unless, of course, that trip is the story).

I have a friend who, when I return from a trip, never asks me, “How was your trip?” She knows that I would give her a long, rambling answer: “… and then … and then … and then.” So instead, she says, “Tell me about one thing that really stood out for you.” That’s what I’d like you to do in this travel essay you’re writing.

The Power of Compelling Scenes

One or two “snapshots” are enough—but make them great. Many good writers jump right into the middle of their account with a vivid written “snapshot” of an important scene. Then, having aroused their readers’ interest or curiosity, they fill in the story or background. I think this technique works great for travel writing; at least, I would rather enjoy a vivid snapshot than read through a day-to-day summary of somebody’s travel journal.

Write About a Trip Using Vivid Descriptions

Take your time. Tell a story. So what if you saw things that were “incredible,” did things that were “amazing,” observed actions that you thought “weird”? These words don’t mean anything to me unless you show me, in a story or a vivid description, the experience that made you want to use those adjectives.

I’d like to see the place, the people, or the journey through your eyes, not someone else’s. Please don’t rewrite someone else’s account of visiting the place. Please don’t try to imitate a travel guide or travelogue or someone’s blog or Facebook entry. You are not writing a real travel essay unless you are describing, as clearly and honestly as possible, yourself in the place you visited. What did you see, hear, taste, say? Don’t worry if your “take” on your experience doesn’t match what everyone else says about it. (I’ve already read what THEY have to say.)

The Importance of Self-Editing Your Trip Essay

Don’t give me your first draft to read. Instead, set it aside and then reread it. Reread it again. Where might I need more explanation? What parts of your account are likely to confuse me? (After all, I wasn’t there.) Where might you be wasting my time by repeating or rambling on about something you’ve already told me?

Make me feel, make me laugh, help me learn something. But don’t overdo it: Please don’t preach to me about broadening my horizons or understanding other cultures. Instead, let me in on your feelings, your change of heart and mind, even your fear and uncertainty, as you confronted something you’d never experienced before. If you can, surprise me with something I didn’t know or couldn’t have suspected.

You Can Do It: Turning Your Trip into a Great Travel Experience Essay

I hope you will take yourself seriously as a traveler and as a writer. Through what—and how—you write about just a small portion of your travel experience, show me that you are an interesting, thoughtful, observant person. I will come back to you, begging for more of your travel essays.

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How To Write a Good Travel Essay

• March 18, 2020

Travelling is one of the most exciting parts of everyone’s life. In the same way, this experience has the potential to be a fascinating topic for your writing assignments.

Writing a travel essay requires minimal creativity because trips are full of extraordinary events by their nature, as well as dramas and cultural findings. So, there’s no need to make things up or think through ideas while you are writing this kind of essay. To make life even easier you can even order essay .

However, as easy as it may sound, turning a travel experience into a piece of writing can be a bit challenging for students. Because if not careful, they will end up writing some dull clichés about a bunch of different places, and nothing more.

If you’ve never read any trips or you don’t have enough time to write a paper, you can quickly get your essay written by making use of available writing services. However, here we present some practical guidelines to help you write an exceptional essay:

Select Your Favorite City

Sometimes a trip is explicitly taken to collect information for an essay. If this is true about you, take your time to choose your destination carefully. Do some research before deciding on the city. Read about various regions and see which ones inspire you the most.

Your task here is to share useful information with people and get them involved in your journey. If you can’t enjoy your own trip, how can you let others have fun while reading the story? So it’s essential to choose a destination that you are interested in.

Choose a Few Attractions

Every city or town usually has several tourist attractions. If you attempt to include every single place you visited on that journey, your writing would be a boring list of city attractions that can be found anywhere, such as a tourist website.

Rather than mentioning multiple sights, focus on two or three places, and provide detailed information about them. Let readers know few, but know well.

Another point is that famous attractions are not proper choices for your writing because almost everyone knows the basic information about these places. Put your focus on unknown sites, remembering that people want to hear about something they have never heard.

Write a Compelling First Paragraph

Your first paragraph is usually the most important one. It’s where you convince the readers you had an incredible trip – one that has something new to teach your audience and is worth reading about.

Start with an unusual tradition you witnessed, an interesting dialogue you had, or a cultural misunderstanding you faced during your journey.

Use your sense of humor. Be as innovative as you can. No matter what you do, the final aim is to engage the readers and make them stick to your story.

Show Rather Than Tell

‘Showing’ is what makes a difference between a boring and outstanding travel essay. When you show something with your words, you actually describe what you experienced in full details. However, when you tell something, it’s like you’re just giving a brief report on what you did.

Readers won’t understand what an incredible park, a fabulous road, or a fantastic building means unless you show it to them. Showing makes the readers feel they’ve been there with you.

Therefore, don’t merely rely on telling where you went. Instead, add specific descriptions about that place, talk about your feelings, and paint an imaginary picture of that space in the minds of readers.

Images serve as a complement to your verbal description as they help readers imagine your story better.

One or two pictures is enough, but try to pick the most breathtaking ones that are more related to your narrative. Also, remember that vivid shots are always a better option than black and white ones because they are more eye-catching and can better intrigue the reader’s curiosity.

Keep It Simple

The primary purpose of writing a traveling essay is to entertain your readers. So, there’s no need to show off by using literary words or highly academic structure. Instead, use an active voice, try to be friendly, and bring readers closer to your story.

In this kind of essay, your writing intelligence depends on your ability to amuse people and your art of describing scenes, not using a lot of fluffy sentences.

Describe What You Achieved

If your traveling experience didn’t teach you anything or couldn’t make a positive change in your life, it would be a significant loss of time and money. Every great experience comes with great achievement. This can be as small as a shift in your beliefs, or as big as making wonderful friends. Whatever the accomplishment is, it’s worth telling your readers about it.

Give Readers a Good Ending

Every fantastic narrative begins with a good starting point, continues with a climax, and ends with a reasonable conclusion. Plan your paragraphs before writing. Think about the ways you want to start your story, go through the rising action, and then slow it down gradually to let readers know they are reaching the end of the story. If you end your writing in the middle of the turning point where the reader is reading the most thrilling part of the story, they might get puzzled and confused. It’s like putting an obstacle in front of a high-speed runner and making him stop all of a sudden.

Bottom Line

Travels are full of new experiences. Sometimes a short trip gives you a handful of stories to tell your future grandchildren. They have a lot to teach us and therefore, a lot to talk about. So why not use them as a subject for your writings? The next time you will be searching the net for online essay writing services with “interesting topics to write my essay,” think about your traveling experiences and bring everything you can remember on the paper. Then, google some “help write my essay tips” to learn the main guidelines for writing a travel essay.

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Future Plans Essay

500+ words future plans essay.

Everyone has dreams and plans for the future. In our childhood, we dream of becoming a doctor, an engineer, an astronaut, etc. It’s we who really know best what we like. We know what we want in our life. Future plans can be different for different students. Below is just a sample essay that students can use for reference. This future plan essay will help students to write an effective essay on their future plans. They can also get the list of CBSE Essays on different topics for their practice. It will boost their score in English exams and also help them to participate in various essay writing competitions.

My Future Plan

I often wonder about my future as I am about to finish my schooling. There are a number of questions in my mind, and the one which mostly revolves around my mind is which profession I should choose. It is difficult for me to make a choice because I am aware that the decision will impact my entire life. I always dream of a profession that I can enjoy, that brings a challenge to me and satisfies me. I believe in a job that is like a hobby for me. I just don’t want to do the job to make money. Instead, I want to love my profession and duty. Also, my job should be such that I contribute to society and help people.

From my childhood, I always wanted to treat people and cure their diseases. So, to fulfil this dream of becoming a doctor, I have some future plans. Firstly, I have to complete my secondary schooling. Then, I have to complete my higher secondary education, and thereafter, I would like to study in a prestigious medical college and later become a doctor.

Studying medical science takes a long time. It is a difficult course and requires a tremendous amount of hard work and patience. I hope that I will be able to meet all the challenges and complete my studies well. After the completion of my studies, I would like to work in a hospital, so I can make my dream come true.

During my studies, I will have to work on different biology projects. The experience of working on these projects will give me insight into science and help me in becoming a good doctor. In addition, I also have to develop patience and diligence. During the summer vacations, I will have to work under a good doctor as an assistant nurse. It will help me to get real-life experience of how doctors work. Moreover, the learning will help me to deal with patients, nurses, doctors and staff of the hospital. It will be the best kickstart for my career as a future medical student.

As for now, I am focusing on my studies and looking forward to completing my schooling. I do have a future plan for my family. But, before that, I would like to travel the world. I want to visit different countries like America, Finland and London and travel to all the continents. After finishing my education and going on a world trip, I would like to settle down in my life. So, I will get married and would love to have a small family. I would like to have a small home in a natural and calm place where I can live and enjoy myself with my family.

Students must have found “Future Plans Essay” useful for improving their essay writing skills. Visit BYJU’S website to get the latest updates and study material on CBSE/ICSE/State Board/Competitive Exams at BYJU’S.

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Short Essay: My Adventurous Trip

A couple of short essay examples on an adventurous trip.

Table of Contents

My Adventurous Trip Essay Example 1

Traveling is one of the most exciting experiences one can have in life. It allows us to explore new places, meet different people, and create unforgettable memories. My recent adventurous trip was one such experience that I will cherish for a lifetime. The trip involved hiking through a dense forest, crossing a river, and reaching the summit of a mountain, where I enjoyed a breathtaking view. Despite facing challenges such as unpredictable weather and rough terrain, the trip was a memorable and rewarding experience. In this essay, I will share my experience of this adventurous trip, highlighting the challenges, the exhilarating moments, and the memories that I will cherish forever.

Our trip started with hiking through a dense forest. The forest was full of tall trees, colorful flowers, and chirping birds. The trail was steep and rocky, and we had to be careful while walking. The forest was so dense that we could hardly see the sun, and the air was full of freshness. We had to take breaks in between to catch our breath and hydrate ourselves. As we walked, we could hear the sound of a river, and after a few hours of hiking, we finally reached the river. The river was wide and had a strong current, and we had to cross it to continue our journey. We had to be careful while crossing the river, and we held hands to maintain our balance. The water was cold, and we could feel the current pushing us, but we made it to the other side, feeling proud of ourselves.

The highlight of our trip was reaching the summit of the mountain. The climb was steep and exhausting, but the view from the top was worth every effort. From the top of the mountain, we could see the entire valley, and it was a sight to behold. The sky was clear, and the sun was shining brightly, making the view even more beautiful. We took pictures and sat there for a while, enjoying the serene beauty of nature. We could hear the sound of birds and feel the cool breeze on our faces. It was a moment of pure bliss, and we felt grateful for being able to witness such a beautiful view.

Despite facing challenges such as unpredictable weather and rough terrain, the trip was a memorable and rewarding experience. We had to face unexpected rain and strong winds, which made the climb more challenging. We slipped a few times, but we managed to keep going, motivated by the thought of reaching the summit. The journey was long and tiring, but the memories we created were worth it. We bonded with our fellow travelers, shared laughter, and created memories that we will cherish forever. The trip taught us to be resilient, to push ourselves beyond our limits, and to appreciate the beauty of nature.

In conclusion, my adventurous trip was an unforgettable experience that allowed me to explore the beauty of nature, push my limits, and create memories that I will cherish forever. Hiking through a dense forest, crossing a river, and reaching the summit of a mountain were challenging but rewarding experiences. Despite facing unpredictable weather and rough terrain, we persevered and created memories that will stay with us for a lifetime. The trip taught us the importance of resilience, perseverance, and appreciation for the beauty of nature. It was an experience that I will always treasure and would love to relive again.

My Adventurous Trip Essay Example 2

My adventurous trip was an experience of a lifetime. It was a chance for me to step out of my comfort zone and explore the great outdoors. The trip was filled with activities such as hiking, camping, and kayaking. The beautiful scenery and wildlife sightings made the trip memorable. Overcoming challenges such as inclement weather and physical exertion added to the sense of accomplishment and adventure. In this essay, I will share my experiences of this unforgettable trip.

Hiking was one of the most exciting activities of the trip. We started our hike early in the morning, and the trail was challenging, but the view was worth it. The trail led us through dense forests, and we saw wildflowers, butterflies, and birds along the way. We stopped for a break at a small waterfall, and the sound of the water was soothing. As we continued our hike, we came across a steep incline, which was physically demanding, but we pushed on. At the peak, we were rewarded with an incredible view of the valley below. The sense of accomplishment we felt after completing the hike was indescribable.

Camping was another activity that added to the adventure of the trip. We set up our tents near a lake, and the view was breathtaking. We spent the night sitting around a campfire, roasting marshmallows, and sharing stories. The night sky was clear, and we saw countless stars, which was a beautiful sight. The next morning, we woke up early to go kayaking on the lake. The water was calm, and we saw fish jumping out of the water. We even saw a family of ducks swimming nearby. Kayaking was a peaceful and relaxing experience.

The trip was not without its challenges, however. We faced inclement weather during our kayaking, and it was physically demanding. The waves were strong, and the water was choppy. We had to navigate our kayaks through the waves carefully. At times, it was nerve-wracking, but we were able to push through and complete the activity. Overcoming these challenges added to the sense of adventure and accomplishment.

In conclusion, my adventurous trip was an experience that I will cherish forever. The activities such as hiking, camping, and kayaking, the beautiful scenery and wildlife sightings, and the challenges we faced made the trip unforgettable. It was an opportunity for me to step out of my comfort zone, explore the great outdoors, and create memories with friends. I hope to have more opportunities like this in the future.

My Adventurous Trip Essay Example 3

Going on an adventurous trip is an experience that many people crave. It is an opportunity to explore new destinations, push oneself to the limit, and create unforgettable memories. I recently had the chance to embark on one such journey, and it was an experience that I will never forget. My adventurous trip involved hiking through a dense forest to reach a remote waterfall. Along the way, I encountered challenging terrain and had to navigate through rough terrain. Despite the difficulties, the stunning views and sense of accomplishment made the trip a truly unforgettable adventure. In this essay, I will describe my trip in detail, highlighting the challenges and the rewards that came with it.

The first part of my adventurous trip involved hiking through a dense forest to reach a remote waterfall. The trail was not well-marked, and the terrain was challenging, consisting of steep inclines, muddy patches, and slippery rocks. The dense foliage made it difficult to see the path ahead, and we had to rely on our instincts and map reading skills to find our way through. The forest was alive with the sounds of birds and small animals, and the air was fresh and invigorating. As we got closer to our destination, the sound of rushing water became louder, and we knew we were getting close. Finally, after several hours of hiking, we arrived at the waterfall, and the sight before us was breathtaking. The waterfall was a powerful force of nature, cascading down from a height of over 100 feet. The water was crystal clear, and the surrounding rocks were covered in moss and ferns. It was a sight that made all the hiking and exertion worth it.

The second part of my adventurous trip involved navigating through rough terrain. The terrain was rocky and uneven, and we had to be careful not to slip or fall. At some points, the trail was so steep that we had to use ropes to climb up or down. The weather was also unpredictable, and we had to be prepared for sudden rain or wind. Despite the challenges, the sense of adventure and excitement kept us going. We were a group of friends, and we encouraged and supported each other along the way. We shared food and water, helped each other over difficult patches, and cheered each other on when we reached a milestone. The journey was not just about reaching the destination; it was also about the bonds we formed and the memories we created.

The final part of my adventurous trip was the sense of accomplishment that came with it. After several hours of hiking, navigating challenging terrain, and enduring unpredictable weather, we finally reached our destination. The feeling of standing in front of the waterfall, surrounded by the beauty of nature, was indescribable. It was a sense of accomplishment that came from pushing ourselves beyond our limits, from facing our fears and overcoming them. We took pictures, laughed, and savored the moment. It was a feeling that stayed with us long after the trip was over. The adventurous trip was not just a physical journey; it was also a journey of the mind and the spirit.

In conclusion, my adventurous trip was an experience that I will never forget. It involved hiking through a dense forest to reach a remote waterfall, navigating through rough terrain, and the sense of accomplishment that came with it. The trip was challenging, but it was also rewarding. It reminded me of the beauty of nature, the importance of perseverance, and the power of friendship. It was an experience that taught me to appreciate the simple things in life and to embrace the adventure that comes with it.

About Mr. Greg

Mr. Greg is an English teacher from Edinburgh, Scotland, currently based in Hong Kong. He has over 5 years teaching experience and recently completed his PGCE at the University of Essex Online. In 2013, he graduated from Edinburgh Napier University with a BEng(Hons) in Computing, with a focus on social media.

Mr. Greg’s English Cloud was created in 2020 during the pandemic, aiming to provide students and parents with resources to help facilitate their learning at home.

Whatsapp: +85259609792

[email protected]

Essay On Travel

500 words essay on travel.

Travelling is an amazing way to learn a lot of things in life. A lot of people around the world travel every year to many places. Moreover, it is important to travel to humans. Some travel to learn more while some travel to take a break from their life. No matter the reason, travelling opens a big door for us to explore the world beyond our imagination and indulge in many things. Therefore, through this Essay on Travel, we will go through everything that makes travelling great.

Why Do We Travel?

There are a lot of reasons to travel. Some people travel for fun while some do it for education purposes. Similarly, others have business reasons to travel. In order to travel, one must first get an idea of their financial situation and then proceed.

Understanding your own reality helps people make good travel decisions. If people gave enough opportunities to travel, they set out on the journey. People going on educational tours get a first-hand experience of everything they’ve read in the text.

Similarly, people who travel for fun get to experience and indulge in refreshing things which may serve as a stress reducer in their lives. The culture, architecture, cuisine and more of the place can open our mind to new things.

The Benefits of Travelling

There are numerous benefits to travelling if we think about it. The first one being, we get to meet new people. When you meet new people, you get the opportunity to make new friends. It may be a fellow traveller or the local you asked for directions.

Moreover, new age technology has made it easier to keep in touch with them. Thus, it offers not only a great way to understand human nature but also explore new places with those friends to make your trip easy.

Similar to this benefit, travelling makes it easier to understand people. You will learn how other people eat, speak, live and more. When you get out of your comfort zone, you will become more sensitive towards other cultures and the people.

Another important factor which we learn when we travel is learning new skills. When you go to hilly areas, you will most likely trek and thus, trekking will be a new skill added to your list.

Similarly, scuba diving or more can also be learned while travelling. A very important thing which travelling teaches us is to enjoy nature. It helps us appreciate the true beauty of the earth .

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of the Essay on Travel

All in all, it is no less than a blessing to be able to travel. Many people are not privileged enough to do that. Those who do get the chance, it brings excitement in their lives and teaches them new things. No matter how a travelling experience may go, whether good or bad, it will definitely help you learn.

FAQ on Essay on Travel

Question 1: Why is it advantageous to travel?

Answer 1: Real experiences always have better value. When we travel to a city, in a different country, it allows us to learn about a new culture, new language, new lifestyle, and new peoples. Sometimes, it is the best teacher to understand the world.

Question 2: Why is travelling essential?

Answer 2: Travelling is an incredibly vital part of life. It is the best way to break your monotonous routine and experience life in different ways. Moreover, it is also a good remedy for stress, anxiety and depression.

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The Morning

When travel plans go awry.

There are ways of keeping ourselves anchored, even when we enter a parallel universe disconnected from time.

By Melissa Kirsch

The weekend trip is, in theory, the perfect break. Two nights someplace else, just a small duffel bag and limited logistics standing between you and a reset. Leave on Friday, come back Sunday, fill the hours in between with enough that’s novel and return refreshed, or at least with a slightly altered perspective. You might take a weekend trip for vacation or work or to see family, but the effect is the same. You’re a little changed on return. You see your regular life a little bit differently.

I took what was meant to be a quick trip last weekend to attend a college graduation, and it was, strictly speaking, quick: I was scarcely away for 48 hours, but extreme weather marooned me for most of those hours in the liminal spaces of transit — airports, grounded planes, traffic jams — where time loses legibility. An old friend used to call these neither-here-nor-there realms the “zero world” for the way they feel unfastened from reality, parallel to daily life but separate. The flight cabin after an announcement of a fourth lightning delay is a world detached from the one you know, a temporary society populated by temporary citizens with perhaps not much in common save one deeply held belief: We need to get out of here.

I was as cranky and impatient as the rest of my fellow travelers at each complication in our journeys, but also fascinated by the communities and customs and Cibo Express markets of the zero world. Each of us was, at any given time, one captain’s announcement away from a temper tantrum, but we were also competitively careful to be polite to one another and to the airline staff, as if determined to demonstrate that those wild videos of short-tempered passengers being duct-taped to their seats did not represent us, the makeshift civilization of this departure lounge.

Graduation, when I finally arrived, was a joyous affair despite the glitches. The speaker, an astronaut, showed a photo of the farm where she grew up, the place she thought of as home for much of her life. Then she showed a photo of the limb of the Earth, the glowing edge of the atmosphere, and described how, when she went to space, home was no longer a town on a map but this planet, a shift in perspective so massive I felt a little queasy contemplating it.

On Hour 3 in the airport bar on Sunday morning, beside two German travelers practicing Spanish, I ordered an omelet and imagined my own home, which felt very far away and lit by its own otherworldly halo. What would I be doing if I were there? Reading, texting, catching up on emails — the same things I was doing here. What was so bad about this? Was it the lack of choice? The lack of fresh air?

It was all those things, and also the feeling of being trapped in a warp between origin and destination. My emotions felt out of proportion to the situation: I hadn’t traveled very far for very long, was in no peril and would still arrive in New York with enough day left to do whatever needed to be done, but I felt on the verge of tears, loosed from my moorings, floating between fixed points, dislocated. I put on my headphones, put on a favorite band whose songs are so familiar they provide a home base no matter where I am. I listened to the same album on repeat for the duration of the flight, in the car on the way home, even at home once I finally made it there.

There’s a story in The Times today about how A.S.M.R., the pleasant, brain-tingling feeling we get when hearing certain sounds or watching certain comforting scenes, has become a feature of all viral internet content, not just specialized videos devoted to inducing the sensation. You can still put on a very specific video of someone whispering into a microphone or crinkling paper, but you’re just as likely to find the stimuli in videos of people cooking or cleaning their pools. This seems like a logical extension. We’re restless beasts in need of soothing. Sometimes we’re dramatically homesick, sometimes it’s just a bad day. Why not imbue the mundane with the choreography of comfort? Why not add pleasure whenever and wherever we can?

For weekend travel inspiration: The Times’s 36 Hours series.

How to deal with the increasing unpredictability of travel .

Stunning views of Earth from space .

How A.S.M.R. became a sensation.

THE WEEK IN CULTURE

The final round of the Eurovision Song Contest takes place in Sweden today. This year’s favorites include a Croatian techno act called Baby Lasagna. Read , or listen to , a guide to the competition.

“I won’t let anything break me”: Eden Golan, Israel’s 20-year-old entrant, spoke to The Times about the campaign to exclude her country from the event because of the war in Gaza.

The stage crew has 50 seconds to disassemble and reassemble sets. Watch a video from The Wall Street Journal .

Film and TV

“It’s easy to get caught up in the bigness of it all”: Owen Teague, the star of the latest “Planet of the Apes” film, and Andy Serkis, the lead in the earlier movies, sat down for a conversation .

“Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” is not as transporting as the previous trilogy of films, the Times critic Alissa Wilkinson writes , but “there’s still a tremendous amount to mull over.”

The latest season of “Doctor Who,” starring Ncuti Gatwa as the 15th actor to play the doctor, opened with a double episode. Read a recap.

Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery announced a plan to bundle their Disney+, Hulu and Max streaming services this summer

The recording engineer Steve Albini, who died this week at 61, was “arguably the most influential figure ever to emerge from indie rock,” Pitchfork wrote . Listen to 10 of his essential tracks , which shaped the sound of alternative rock music.

Kendrick Lamar and Drake’s rap beef crashed the website Genius , where users can annotate lyrics to songs. Times critics discussed where the rappers’ sonic conflict goes next .

Other Big Stories

A stage version of the beloved animated film “Spirited Away” is running in London, after premiering in Japan. The adaptation is opulent and impressive, but it could use more heart , our critic writes.

A federal judge granted a preliminary injunction that would bar the Des Moines Art Center from dismantling “Greenwood Pond: Double Site,” an environmental work by Mary Miss that includes wooden walkways and sitting areas in need of repair.

The owners of the Los Angeles house where Marilyn Monroe last lived, and died, sued the city, accusing officials of “backroom machinations” to save it from a planned demolition .

David Shapiro, a lyrical poet who appeared in a famous photograph from the 1968 uprising at Columbia University, died at 77 .

THE LATEST NEWS

Israel-Hamas War

A Biden administration report said that Israel may have broken international law in Gaza, but that Israel’s “credible and reliable” assurances mean the U.S. can keep sending weapons.

The Biden administration is still waiting for Israel to show how it plans to evacuate and protect civilians in Rafah ahead of a possible invasion.

The U.N. General Assembly voted to support Palestinian statehood , a symbolic move. The U.S. voted no, and Israel accused delegates of “shredding the U.N. charter.”

Michael Cohen, who paid Stormy Daniels hush money and whom prosecutors say Donald Trump reimbursed, is expected to testify Monday in Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial. The judge asked prosecutors to stop Cohen from criticizing Trump .

Russia tried to break through Ukrainian lines in the country’s north using shelling and armored columns. Ukraine said it had repelled the attacks.

Russia is upgrading a munitions depot in Belarus, possibly to house nuclear weapons , a Times analysis of satellite imagery found.

The Biden administration plans to raise tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles to protect U.S. auto manufacturers.

Apple is revamping Siri to offer more advanced A.I. responses , akin to ChatGPT.

An appeals court upheld Steve Bannon’s conviction for defying a subpoena from the House Jan. 6 committee. He could soon have to serve prison time.

A Virginia school board voted to restore the names of Confederate leaders — including Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson — to two schools, reversing its 2020 decision to rename them .

CULTURE CALENDAR

By Desiree Ibekwe

🎥 Back to Black (Friday): You may well have seen the online discussion about this movie, an Amy Winehouse biopic directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson. The movie — which focuses on Winehouse’s relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil — was No. 1 at the British box office but divided viewers and critics, some of whom found fault with the appearance of its star, Marisa Abela. “I don’t need to convince people that they’re actually watching Amy,” Abela told The Times . “I need to remind people of her soul.”

RECIPE OF THE WEEK

By Melissa Clark

Strawberry Shortcake

It’s Mother’s Day tomorrow, and if your mom has a sweet tooth (and if so, I can relate), Jane Grigson’s strawberry shortcake as adapted by Nancy Harmon Jenkins might be just the thing for a celebratory brunch. Make the biscuit dough and cut out the rounds the day before (just keep them in the fridge until baking time). Then, while they’re in the oven, you can macerate the berries (any kind you like) with sugar and prep the whipped cream. Be sure to save any leftover biscuits. They’re excellent toasted for breakfast the next day.

REAL ESTATE

The hunt: An American took a chance on the Lake Geneva area of Eastern France, with a $300,000 budget. Which home did she buy? Play our game .

What you get for $900,000: A Frank Lloyd Wright house in Wilmette, Ill.; an 1879 three-bedroom house in Wilmington, N.C.; or a renovated ranch house in Scottsdale, Ariz.

Free help: A filmmaker, feeling unhelpful in her daily life, decided to offer small favors to passers-by in Union Square.

Made for walking: Brides are increasingly pairing cowboy boots with relaxed silhouetted dresses.

Scarlett Johansson: The actress shared her beauty regimen with T Magazine.

How to: Restoring a chair is easier than one might think . Here’s how a couple known as the Brownstone Boys did it.

ADVICE FROM WIRECUTTER

Food processors, blenders and choppers.

Countertop appliances can help you get a meal on the table faster, often with less work and a quicker cleanup. But deciding which gizmo is best for you can be a challenge. It depends on what kinds of foods you most frequently prepare, Wirecutter’s kitchen experts say. For example, if your main goal is to reduce the time you spend prepping ingredients, a food processor is likely your best bet. If you demand the smoothest, silkiest textures from your soups, sauces and smoothies (and have ample storage space), consider a full-size blender. Oh, and those TikTok-famous manual vegetable choppers ? No one needs those. — Rose Lorre

GAMES OF THE WEEK

W.N.B.A. season openers: A once-in-a-generation group enters the W.N.B.A. next week. You may already know their names: Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, Cameron Brink, Kamilla Cardoso. Their college matchups shattered viewership records, and their pro draft last month did the same. The W.N.B.A. is trying to seize the moment: Nearly all of Clark’s games with the Indiana Fever will be national broadcasts , and some of her games are moving to bigger arenas to meet fan demand.

The season begins Tuesday, as Clark and the Fever face the Connecticut Sun and M.V.P. contender Alyssa Thomas. After that, the two-time defending champion Las Vegas Aces play Brittney Griner and the Phoenix Mercury. 7:30 p.m. and 10 p.m. Eastern on ESPN2

More coverage

Clark and Cardoso are featured in a documentary series , “Full Court Press,” airing on ABC this weekend, which follows them through their final season of college.

The W.N.B.A. is expanding : The league plans to add a 13th team, in the San Francisco area, next season, and a 14th, in Toronto, the year after.

NOW TIME TO PLAY

Here is today’s Spelling Bee . Yesterday’s pangram was uncloak .

Take the news quiz to see how well you followed this week’s headlines.

And here are today’s Mini Crossword , Wordle , Sudoku , Connections and Strands .

Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. — Melissa

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Melissa Kirsch is the deputy editor of Culture and Lifestyle at The Times and writes The Morning newsletter on Saturdays. More about Melissa Kirsch