Can Travel Heal a Broken Heart? What I Found Out Trip by Trip

Can travel heal a broken heart?

I spent the better part of a year trying to find out. Not deliberately. I didn’t book a series of trips as a therapeutic exercise or decide that movement was the answer to the disintegration of a 20 year marriage. It was more accidental than that. The trips were already in motion. The marriage ended anyway. And I went because I am a professional and professionals show up, and also because the alternative was falling into a pit of despair and I could not afford the pit.

What followed was one of the most complicated and clarifying years of my life. Rocky Mountaineer through the Canadian Rockies. Iceland, France and Italy with my daughters. A reconnection weekend in Elora with my girlfriends. Tahiti, seven months after it all fell apart.

This is what I actually learned, trip by trip.

The Year My Marriage Ended and I Kept Going Anyway

The marriage ended in the summer. The trips had been planned long before that. Some were press trips I had committed to professionally. Some were family trips my daughters and I had been looking forward to for months. None of them got cancelled. And none of them fixed anything, but all of them mattered in ways I did not understand until later.

So before we go any further, I want to be clear, travel did not heal my broken heart. I want to say that up front because every other article you will find on this subject is going to tell you to book a flight and feel better and that is simply not realistic. Especially, if financially, travel will be a strain. Travel however did do something more useful and more specific than healing. It kept me moving. It forced me to get up and show up and put one foot in front of the other when staying horizontal felt like a reasonable life choice.

When grief surrounds you, it’s not realistic to expect rescue. What can help you is momentum. Travel gave that to me.

Rocky Mountaineer: When Travel Moves You Forward Without Your Permission

I went on the Rocky Mountaineer one week after my marriage ended. I sat in a Gold Leaf seat and watched the Canadian Rockies slide past the glass dome and tried very hard to feel something other than what I was actually feeling.

I did not know then that the train was doing something for me anyway. Quietly, without my awareness, in the background of my grief, it was making me get up. Making me show up. Making me put one foot in front of the other through some of the most extraordinary scenery on earth while internally I was asking myself how I was going to survive the next chapter of my life.

It turns out that showing up was enough. In fact, it showed me I could do hard things, even when I’d rather hide under the covers. Was it mind blowing at the time? No, not really, but sometimes, it’s only when we look back through the lens of time that we can fully appreciate an experience.

I wrote the full honest review of that trip here, including whether Rocky Mountaineer is worth it when your heart is in pieces, and when it’s not. The short answer is yes. The longer answer is more interesting.

Iceland: When the World Matches Your Mood

A few weeks later I took my daughters to Iceland. They were 13 and 15. We were all numb in our own ways, navigating something none of us had a map for, in a country none of us had been to before.

Iceland in early July does not get dark. The sun barely sets. You lose track of time completely, which when your entire sense of normal has already been dismantled, feels oddly appropriate. The world outside matched the world inside. Upside down, unscheduled, operating on logic that did not apply anywhere else.

I’ll always remember taking my daughters out for hot dogs at 3am, all social norms tossed aside for a food I wouldn’t dream of serving at home. Hot dogs, as it turns out, are an Icelandic speciality. So when in Rome, as they say, though we were decidedly not in Rome.

There we were, three women at a hot dog stand in full daylight in the middle of the night, everything completely wrong and somehow completely fine. Nothing about that summer was normal. Iceland did not pretend otherwise. There was something clarifying about that.

Iceland did not lift us out of our funk. But it held us. Sometimes that is what you need first.

France and Italy: When the World Cracks Back Open

France was different. The sun was out and the whitewashed buildings were like a salve for the soul. Everything was bright and shiny and historic and resolutely, magnificently Parisian. The Louvre was extraordinary. Versailles was beyond words. But it was the human moments that broke through.

We were in Paris when France won the World Cup. The city lost its mind in the best possible way. We were swept up in collective joy that had nothing to do with us and everything to do with us, strangers celebrating in the streets, the whole city vibrating with something enormous and uncomplicated. When your own joy feels out of reach, borrowing someone else’s for an evening turns out to be surprisingly effective medicine.

Then there was the French waiter who absolutely did not want to find my Pardon My French t-shirt funny. He found it funny anyway. That involuntary laugh from a man determined not to be charmed by a Canadian tourist helped me remember humour would carry me. We stood at the Eiffel Tower lit up at night. We had time together, my daughters and I, with a completely different backdrop clearing away some of the noise of everything we had been through.

And then Italy.

I ate my way through Italy. Worth it.

And we walked, and walked, and walked some more. I drank coffee standing up at bars the way you are supposed to. I did not waste a brain cell on calorie counting. One of our guides informed us that Italian men were beautiful to look at, but babies to be in a relationship with, so we spent a lot of time looking. Research of course, which led to a unique parenting experience of ogling beautiful men with my teenage daughters, something no one puts in the guidebooks.

Then, in the middle of our trip, my best friend and her family arrived. This trip was not planned together but the timing aligned. It was kismet at its finest. I cried to her and to her Sicilian mother in a trattoria, about my marriage ending. As only an Italian mother can, she offered to take me and my daughters home with her when we got back. The full force of Italian maternal love descended on us completely. It was only later I remembered I had my own formidable mama bear waiting at home.

We laughed about that for a long time.

France and Italy did not fix the broken thing. But they reminded us that the world was still out there, still beautiful, still capable of producing unexpected joy. It was like the world was pulling us gently back into its rotation, encouraging us to embrace her beauty.

Elora With My Girlfriends: When the World Feels Right Again

A few months in I went to Elora with my girlfriends for a weekend. No itinerary. No press obligations. No performance of enthusiasm for spectacular scenery. Just women who have known me long enough to say the true things and make me laugh until it hurts.

Reconnecting with your people after a period of upheaval feels like the world clicking back into place. Not fixed. Not resolved. Just right again, briefly, in the specific way that only your oldest friends can make it feel right. Nobody will hype you up quite like your besties. Nobody will also tell you the truth quite like them either, which is the more useful service.

That weekend in Elora did something the bigger trips had not quite managed. It gave me comfort. A genuine, uncomplicated, this is still your life and it is still good kind of comfort.

It also planted a seed I did not recognize at the time. Those weekends kept happening. Several a year. Different places, same essential thing: women, connection, the particular relief of not having to explain yourself to people who already know you. That impulse, followed far enough, eventually became Girl Trips.

Which is its own story. But it started in Elora.

One Woman, One RV, No Regrets

Somewhere in there I also decided to drive a 21 foot RV through Ontario Parks alone.

I should mention that when this trip was originally planned I was married, had a motorhome, and had someone to drive it. By the time the trip rolled around I was down one husband, one motorhome, and one driver, the first and last being the same person. My life had basically become a country song.

I went anyway. Because cancelling would have meant telling my teenage daughters that I could not do this without a man in my life, and there was no version of that I was willing to model.

I parked the RV. I backed it into a tight spot at Charleston Lake with my tongue out the corner of my mouth and zero grace and total determination. My daughters were impressed. I am fairly certain the dog was even proud of me.

That trip taught me that my life was more like a rock and roll song than a country song, and that I was the one writing the lyrics. Which, it turns out, is exactly the kind of thing you need to know when you are rebuilding.

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Tahiti: When Travel Finally Felt Like Travel Again

Seven months after the marriage ended I went to Tahiti on a press trip.

Something was different. I noticed it in the way you notice a change in air pressure, gradually and then all at once. We marvelled at the natural beauty without it feeling like an assignment. We sat with the extraordinary and let it be extraordinary without having to work at it. And somewhere in there, between the water and the light and the quiet, I started going hours without thinking about my old life.

Hours.

That sounds small. It was not small. It was the first evidence of a new baseline. Seven months of putting one foot in front of the other, trip by trip, hot dog stand by hot dog stand, unplanned collision with your best friend in Italy by unplanned collision with your best friend in Italy, and then suddenly you are sitting in Tahiti going hours without your old life occupying every available corner of your mind.

That is what momentum looks like when it finally shows up as something you can feel.

So Can Travel Heal a Broken Heart

Here is my honest answer after a year of finding out.

No. And yes. And the distinction matters.

Travel will not fix the broken thing. It will not speed up the grief or shortcut the process or deliver you to the other side ahead of schedule. Anyone who tells you otherwise has not actually tried it while genuinely heartbroken.

What travel will do is keep you moving. It will make you get up and show up and engage with the world when disengaging feels easier. It will put you in the path of unexpected joy. Collective jubilation in city streets. Laughter that breaks through when you least expect it. Kindness from strangers who have no idea what you are carrying. It will give you hours, and then more hours, and eventually days, where the old life is not occupying every corner of your mind.

It will, if you let it, remind you that the world is still out there. Still beautiful. Still capable of producing moments that have nothing to do with what you lost and everything to do with what comes next.

That is not healing exactly. It is something more practical and more immediate. It is momentum. And sometimes momentum is what gets you from the version of yourself standing numb at a Rocky Mountaineer boarding platform to the version of yourself marvelling at Tahiti seven months later.

I will take it.

What I Would Tell Anyone Considering It

Go. Even if you cannot imagine enjoying it. Especially if you cannot imagine enjoying it.

Go with your daughters if that is what you have. Go with your girlfriends. Go alone if you need to. Go on the work trip you already committed to even though your world just ended, because professionals show up and also because the alternative is the pit.

Do not expect it to fix you. Expect it to move you. Those are different things and the second one is more reliably on offer.

Accept the unexpected joy when it arrives. The World Cup win. The waiter who cracks. The best friend who appears in Italy like the universe decided you needed her. The Italian mother who offers to absorb you completely into her family. Let those things in even when letting things in feels impossible.

Eat the pasta. Drink the coffee. Look at the beautiful Italian men. Do not waste a brain cell thinking about calories.

And know that somewhere around seven months in, you will sit somewhere extraordinary and realize you have gone hours without thinking about your old life.

That is the moment you are travelling toward. It is worth every step that gets you there.

How to Travel Through Something

A few practical notes for anyone who is actually in it and trying to figure out the logistics.

• Start smaller than you think you need to. A weekend in Elora did as much for me as a week in Iceland. Proximity to your people matters as much as distance from your life.
• Travel with women you trust. Not because you cannot travel alone, you absolutely can and sometimes should, but because the right women will hold you and hype you and tell you the truth and make you laugh until it hurts, and all of those things are useful when you are rebuilding.
• Give yourself permission to feel whatever you feel on the trip. Iceland was not joyful. It was not supposed to be. It was exactly what it was and that was enough.
• Do not photograph everything. Be where you are. The moments that will matter are not the ones you captured.
• And if someone invites you on a trip one week after your marriage ends, go. You will not enjoy it the way you planned. You will get something better.

Can Travel Heal a Broken Heart: Your Questions Answered