The film adaptation of Eat, Pray, Love comes out this Friday and we suspect a lot of people will finally use their vacation time to book a trip to Italy, India or Indonesia.  So that got us thinking about other movies that inspire travel.

These are movies that make you want to follow in each character’s footsteps and get away from it all.  It doesn’t matter if they travel to the other side of the planet or the other side of town, these characters explore the world with fresh eyes, embrace adventure and leave the door open to new and exciting possibilities.

After watching any one of the Top 10 Movies That Inspire Travel, you might become the same way too.

The Beach

When things get boring, go somewhere crazy (usually that’s a place that serves bugs on a stick).  That’s what Leo does in The Beach.  He plays a backpacker who wants to disconnect from his computer and his life, so he goes where every young, broke person who wants to party and do illegal things goes to: Thailand.  While ignoring all sense of responsibility in Bangkok, he finds out about an island paradise where people go to escape the world, explore jungles, play volleyball all day, gaze into the clear night sky and swim through glow-in-the-dark plankton.  As if things couldn’t get any better, Leo gets lucky on a beach, which is, despite the unsanitary conditions, pretty much every traveler’s fantasy.  That might explain why the guys from The Hangover are heading to Thailand.

Before Sunrise

When you’re not looking for love, that’s when you find it.  And when you travel, you’re looking for a lot of other things:  directions, a clean bathroom, someone who speaks English, a bar.  In Before Sunrise, a soul-searching American man looking for something to do before he heads back home meets a sassy Parisian woman on a train.  Just as they’re about to separate, he convinces her to get off the train with him in Vienna.  They then spend a memorable night checking out the sights and talking about heavy topics that are usually reserved until at least date #6.  We’ve watched enough travel movies to know that anyone who goes on a mission of self-discovery eventually gets laid.

City Slickers

The thing to remember, however, is that self-discovery really is about self-discovery.  City Slickers follows three friends stuck in a mid-life crisis who are looking for adventure to escape their dull everyday lives.  After a bad experience at the Running Of The Bulls, they decide to do something a little less dangerous by going on a two-week cattle drive through the Southwest.  It winds up being more dangerous.  When their leader dies on the journey, the men are forced to band together and complete the cattle drive alone.  But in the end, they wind up learning valuable life lessons and realize that their everyday lives aren’t that dull.  The self-discovery sex principle still applies; even though we don’t see it, we know these dudes got laid after they bragged to their wives about their manliness.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

You don’t have to fly to another country to travel.  Sometimes all you’ve got to do is escape the ordinary and do something new in your own city.  In Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, three friends ditch school to discover downtown Chicago, acting like tourists in their own city.  They visit many of the great Chicago attractions like the Sears Tower, the Art Institute of Chicago, Wrigley Field, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and even take part in the German-themed Von Steuben Day parade.  This movie is responsible for more high school truancies than any other movie, but, really, are you ever going to need calculus in the real world?

The Indiana Jones Series

The Indiana Jones movies were probably the first movies to inspire travel for kids growing up.  They’re also the movies that greatly misrepresented the job duties of an archaeologist.  How can you not want to get out of the house after watching Indiana Jones go on an around the world treasure hunt to exotic places like Peru, Egypt, India, Nepal and Brazil?  Sure, the road was paved with danger, but that made it even more exciting.  If you wanted safe and boring, you might as well stay at home, where there’s no risk of getting your heart ripped out of your chest or killed by Nazis.

Into The Wild

At some point everyone gets annoyed with reading Twitter updates on what people had for lunch and paying bills on things you’re not even sure why bought in the first place.  So the kid in Into the Wild decides to abandon the material world and search for the real world, which is apparently located in Alaska.  He could have just taken a cruise like normal people, but instead he gets rid of all his stuff, hitchhikes his way across the U.S. with hippies and eventually makes his way into the beautiful yet ruthless Alaskan wilderness.  It’s the desire to (at least temporarily) live a simple life away from the needless distractions of the modern world that is an impetus for a lot of people to travel in the first place.  Just make sure that if you plan on living off the land, double check that what you are eating isn’t poison.

Joe Vs. The Volcano

We’ve all been told to live each day as if it was our last, but if that was the case, no one would ever go to work.  In Joe Versus the Volcano, Tom Hanks finds out that he only has six months to live, giving him motivation to tell off his boss and quit his job (kinda like this guy).  He decides to go out with a bang — or in this case a sizzling sound — by traveling to a remote island in the Pacific Ocean and jumping into a volcano as a sacrificial lamb on behalf of the quirky, orange soda-loving islanders.  He uses the boat ride there to catch up on some books, save a life, break out of his shell and find love — all pretty good reasons to get out and travel.

The Motorcycle Diaries

Before Che Guevara was a commercialized image on a trendy t-shirt, he was a guy trying to find his place in the world.  The Motorcycle Diaries follows a young Che and his friend Alberto on their 5,000-mile journey across South America.  It’s only after they leave the big city of Buenos Aires that they become aware of the social injustices taking place in small villages.  At Machu Picchu, Che is inspired to start a revolution to give rights back to the common worker and close the gap between the rich and the poor, proving once again that you have to see the world before you can change it.

Roman Holiday

In Roman Holiday, a princess on a tour of European capitals rebels against her regimented life — see?  Even wealthy people can feel stifled too — and sneaks off to explore Rome.  She soon connects with the lone non-sleazy guy in town, a reporter who takes her on a tour of the city.  The two spend the day visiting all the major tourist attractions, which of course leads to them falling in love.  While the movie isn’t necessarily accurate — they didn’t get run over by a Vespa or get pick-pocketed — it shows us how much fun we can have when we do something unexpected.

Under The Tuscan Sun

In case you haven’t noticed by now, most travel movies are about people who need to escape.  The same goes for Diane Lane’s character in Under the Tuscan Sun: she’s recently divorced and suffering from writer’s block.  So her friends convince her to go on a trip to Italy, where she buys a dilapidated villa in the Tuscan countryside.  In the process of fixing the villa, she fixes her life, thanks to a crew of quirky immigrants, interesting neighbors, a couple love interests and some damn good food.  She’s not just escaping her life, she’s escaping the Olive Garden.

The Contest

You’ve read the list and now we want to hear from you.

We’re giving away one of these movies to one lucky reader.  It’s super easy and FREE to enter!

All you have to do is tell us what movie inspires you to travel by leaving a comment below and sharing this story on Twitter or Facebook.  (If you don’t have either of those, you probably don’t have a DVD player to watch these movies anyway).

The winner will be randomly selected on Monday, and that person will get to choose any movie they want from the list.

Find out if you won by subscribing to our RSS, following us on Twitter and friending us on Facebook.

**Winner**

And the winner of our contest is… Dale!  We e-mailed Dale and he chose “Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skulls” as his free movie.  Really, Dale?  You couldn’t pick the best one: “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom”?