When it comes to travel, people are the point. Entrepreneur, traveler, and photography enthusiast Dave Highbloom has understood this since childhood, when his parents instilled in him a deep interest in traveling the world and experiencing the full range of human cultures across the globe. Since the birth of their own children, Dave and his wife have made certain to pass this lesson and passion on to their own three children. In a world that grows ever smaller with each passing year and each new wave of technological advancement, the value inherent in meeting and socializing with people whose backgrounds are wildly different from your own has never been greater.
For Dave, travel isn’t about passing through some foreign locale and snapping a few photos for social media. As much as Dave loves photography, he knows that the real value of travel lies in the human aspect of the experience – in temporarily living a life that is very different from your own. For people of all ages, but especially for the young, travel is fundamentally an educational experience; travel offers up lessons that go well beyond what can be learned inside the walls of a school. Whether across the world or across the street, moving outside the physical boundaries of your own daily life provides unparalleled opportunities to learn and imparts a perspective on life that has no substitute.
Growing up, Dave was fortunate to have a father whose professional life took him to every corner of the globe and a mother whose own interest in international experiences led her to bring Dave along for the ride. From Africa to Australia, Dave followed his parents’ footsteps wherever they led. Later, as a student, Dave studied abroad in Japan, lived in London, and worked in Madagascar through the UN. He would later backpack with his girlfriend across Europe on a Eurail Pass through 8 countries sleeping on trains at night and touring museums by day. He would later marry his travel partner after college, proposing to her after a long rock scramble called the Lemon Squeeze through boulders and cliffs on the Shawangunk Ridge on the southern border of the Catskill Mountains. These experiences formed the backbone of Dave’s perspective on life, and when it was time for Dave and his wife to raise their own children, they did their best to ensure that their kids would take a similar path.
Fortunately, Dave’s children have been enthusiastic devotees of the well-traveled life. Dave’s daughter spent a summer working in Cape Town, South Africa, and the later point of that year between the Fall in Vienna, Austria and the Spring in Madrid, Spain. One of Dave’s sons spent a summer catching poisonous snakes in Costa Rica with a herpetologist he met online and another summer living in Peru, studying Spanish. And his youngest spent a summer in Ecuador living with a host family and another on a 20-day excursion traveling through rural Canada by canoe, surrounded only by icy lakes and the haunting calls of loons in the morning.
There is no better way to gain perspective on life than to experience the lives of others. Dave counts himself as fortunate to have been born into a family of travelers, and to have had the opportunity to pass this outlook on to his own family.