I have never thought of myself as running away from anything, I like to have things at home in order before setting off and not have to come back to problems I have left.
For me it is looking for new experiences, meeting new people and seeing new places, although I do enjoy the feeling of freedom that comes with travel it is not everything.

Perhaps a bit of both depending on the trip.

Most week long or so trips are all about the fun, meeting some people, discovering new places, just being out on the bike.

Having said that we are also planning a much longer trip in less then 3 years that will require some running away from job and…well mainly work I suppose. Great question as I've been sitting here really thinking about it. I have to say that work is causing us both some unhappiness of late and in that regard it feels like we will be running away from it. Having a deadline for our trip helps in that we both know that we are both done with the work. But that's about the only thing I feel like that with.

But I can see how taking a long extended trip would allow someone to simply run away from whatever issues they were having. I could see myself doing it in a different circumstance, for sure. I'm sure it depends on the individual, what, if any, ghosts or skeletons they have. I think perhaps sometimes the journey can start for one reason and turns into something completely different along the way. Sometimes running away is exactly what we need.

For me personally it's about leaving the status quo behind. About not being one of the sheep. Nice home, mortgage, accumulation of stuff, I mean we go to work to make money so we can pay off our stuff. For a lot of us, the stuff begins to own us very quickly. Pretty soon 20 years has passed and we've done nothing meaningful, rush rush rush everywhere, don't have time for much and then end up too frail to truly enjoy the rest of our lives. I mean a great deal of people already do that. We're all born and we're all going to die. It's the in between that we have a say in.

Ultimately it doesn't really matter why you feel propelled to go out on your journey, as long as you simply go.

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Not running away , infact going on a long trip creates problems.
me .... i just do it to fill up my life's hard drive full of memories of something i love doing.
I would hate to be dribbling in my rocking chair thinking "what if "

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