Travel abroad makes the things you have always heard about or learned about more real and more meaningful. To be in the place (if not the time) of historical events makes those places come alive in way that a textbook or someone's telling just can't. You can see pictures of the Lake District in England, but go there, and you can really feel why Wordsworth was so inspired to write all those poems. You can hear stories and see pictures about how the Sistine Chapel ceiling was painted, but go there, and see what all the fuss is really about. Real water-roads? Yes -- in Venice. The list is endless.