25 Great Travel-Themed Movies

We travel for lots of reasons: Pure joy. To see new things. To share the experience with loved ones. To immerse ourselves in a different culture.

The list goes on and on.

The same could be said for watching travel-themed movies. Sometimes it's fun to live vicariously through the adventures of others - and sometimes it's hysterical to watch the misadventures of the doomed traveler. Yes, we're looking at you, Chevy Chase.

So we decided to put together a list of movies with travel as its central theme. And there's the key phrase - central theme. We wanted movies where travel, the journey, is the main plot as opposed to the destination.

So something like 'Planes, Trains and Automobiles' is a perfect example. 'Under The Tuscan Sun?' Well, it might inspire you to buy a villa in Italy but it's not necessarily about travel.

Here's our list (in no particular order).

Steve Martin is a button-down businessman and John Candy is a bit of a slob salesman. Together they are two diverse travelers thrown together after their flight is rerouted by weather to Kansas as they try to get back home to Chicago for Thanksgiving - using any mode of transportation. The misadventures are priceless, as is the scene where the two are forced to share a room and a bed overnight.

Jack Nicholson is a cranky gazillionaire. Morgan Freeman plays a mechanic who is thrown in the same hospital room. When Nicholson picks up a bucket list that the cancer-stricken Freeman had thrown out, he takes the mechanic on the trip of a lifetime that includes the pyramids, an African safari, racecar driving, skydiving and more.

Not sure exactly what to do now that she's newly divorced, Liz Gilbert (Julia Roberts) needs to find herself and find what's important to her. She does it by doing something she never would have done before - travel by herself on a journey of self-discovery that takes her to Italy, India and Bali.

A remake of the original, the plot finds Life magazine employee Walter Mitty on a desperate search for negatives from the quintessential photo that will run in the magazine's final print issue. His travels take him to Greenland, Iceland and finally to the highest reaches of the Himalayas.

From the original, starring Chevy Chase, through the sequels, all the way to the recent remake in which Chase's grown-up son takes his family on a road trip, these movies have held up well. But nothing beats the original and the cross-country trip to Wally World and Chase's encounter with Christie Brinkley.

Sort of a 'Vacation' knockoff. Robin Williams rents a recreational vehicle to take his dysfunctional family on the road. But he doesn't tell them the real reason - he needs to get to Boulder, Colorado, to complete a business deal or lose his job.

Well, you probably can't hit more places in one film than with this one. Inventor Phileas Fogg accepts a challenge to travel around the world in 80 days, and as he circumnavigates the globe he starts and ends in London.

Robert DeNiro plays a former cop-turned-bounty hunter trying to bring in accountant Charles Grodin, who stole money from the mob. When Grodin hilariously claims he can't fly, the two embark on a trip that takes them from New York to Chicago to Arizona to Los Angeles.

The premise is a cross-country car race from Connecticut to California, and it's no-holds-barred. Burt Reynolds and Dom DeLuise are disguised as ambulance drivers; Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. are priests; Roger Moore plays a James Bond knock-off. Stay for the credits, because the outtakes are hysterical.

Meryl Streep's Danish baroness has married into wealth and title, and moves from Denmark to Kenya with her husband to start a coffee plantation. When her husband is unfaithful, Streep herself succumbs to Robert Redford's big-game hunter. The sweeping cinematography of Africa is spectacular.

Inspired by the true story of African-American classical pianist Don Shirley (played by Mahershala Ali) who sets out on a road trip through the deep south in 1962 accompanied by Italian American bouncer Frank "Tony Lip" Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen) as Shirley's driver and bodyguard. The Green Book refers to the publication of African-American friendly hotels and restaurants in the south.

Billy Dee Williams stars as Bingo Long, the leader of a 1930s and '40s era barnstorming baseball team of African-Americans. Barred from playing in the Negro League, Long's team tours the country playing white minor league baseball teams, making a name for themselves. Along the way, there are hijinks - and racism.

A classic. Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) ride their Harleys cross-country to California to complete a drug deal. Along the way, they go through small towns and big cities, including a horrific drug experience in New Orleans, as they contemplate living in America in the late 1960s/early '70s.

Seven-year-old Olive Hoover learns she is a finalist for the Little Miss Sunshine pageant in California. So a diverse and dysfunctional family that includes her parents, uncle, brother and grandfather pile into a VW bus for the trip from Albuquerque. Along the way, there are laughs, tragedy and revelations.

Now, you know that legendary rapper Ice Cube doesn't take any guff. When it comes to kids, however, all bets are off. That's what makes this road trip comedy so funny, the ability of the two kids to wrap Cube around their finger as he accompanies them to visit their mother, whom he has a thing for. When they are booted off the flight, it's time to take Cube's beloved Lincoln Navigator.

Miami, Montreal, Wisconsin … these are just a few of the places where John Krasinski and a pregnant Maya Rudolph travel to in search of the best place to raise their baby. Along the way, well, you guessed it - lots of different experiences on both ends of the spectrum.

Reese Witherspoon plays Cheryl Strayed, a young woman making poor life decisions in the wake of her marriage breaking up and her mother's death. So to start fresh she decides to hike the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail, one of the most difficult trails in the world especially for someone with no hiking experience.

Joshua Jackson, of Dawson's Creek fame, plays a young man who not only finds out he has cancer, but that he has Stage IV cancer with just a 10 percent chance of survival even with treatment. So he buys a used motorcycle and heads west from Toronto to find himself, all the while stopping at any and all 'world's largest' roadside attractions.

A cute movie with heavy undertones. George Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, who works for a downsizing firm and travels the country firing employees. When an idealistic Anna Kendrick devises a plan to do the deed remotely from the home office via streaming to save the heavy travel expenses, Bingham's goal of becoming just the seventh person ever to fly 10 million miles on American Airlines is threatened.

Peru. Nepal. Tunisia. Just a few of the places where Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) travels in pursuit of the coveted ark. Without a doubt, this is one of the great adventure movies of all time with spectacular scenery.

Guarantee - you'd be hard-pressed to find a more beautiful, telegenic movie than The Tourist. From the actors (Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie) to the locales (Paris and Venice), it's a love letter to Europe. And a fairly decent thriller, at that.

Christopher McCandless, the son of wealthy parents, graduates from college with honors and the reputation of a star athlete, giving him the pick of the litter when it comes to jobs. Instead, he fives his savings to charity and sets out on a journey to the Alaskan wilderness to find himself and his true calling.

A powerful and inspirational film. The Way centers on a father from America who flies to France to retrieve the body of his estranged son, who died while attempting the pilgrimage to Spain's Santiago de Compostela. The father then undertakes the journey himself to better understand his own life and his relationship with his son.

Based on the famous novel by the equally famous author Jack Kerouaz, On The Road is the story of Sal Paradise. Sal takes up with the free-spirited Dean and his girlfriend Marylou. Together they take off on a cross-country trip looking to break free from the conventional way of living.

Three U.S. Army service members on leave from the war in Iraq - Colee Dunn (Rachel McAdams), Fred Cheaver (Tim Robbins) and T.K. Poole (Michael Peña - are stuck at a closed airport when they decide to carpool to get to their respective destinations. As they all travel together, each with a different reason for needing to be a certain destination, the soldiers bond as they discuss their futures.