I will never get to all the places I ache to see in person. And now that the pandemic has essentially grounded all international travel for the foreseeable future, I have even less time.
I hate to look at a National Geographic or other travel publications because I inevitably read about and see photographs of an obscure place I’ve never heard about and then I’m yearning to visit there.
My list of “Places to Travel” is very extensive.
I have been as far as Scandinavia and to the lofty 9,700-foot heights known as the Zugspitze on the border of Germany and Austria and in the opposite direction through the Cascades and onto the other-worldly Haiti in the Caribbean.
When I travel, I don’t just want to see – I desire to experience. My dream would be to truly live in a place for a month or more at a time. To snatch a bit of the language, or dialect, to know the people, patronize the shops, revel in the landscape. I was able to do that in Germany a few years ago, walking daily through the wheat fields and to the baker down the Roman-era path, biking along the rivers from village to village and seeing storks nesting on cottage roofs, and picking cherries from branches overhanging a neighbor’s fence.
But I also try to experience a place even if I’m only there for a short time.
For a few days in 2019, I was with my brother and sister-in-law in Louisiana and we not only took a boat ride down a remote swamp-flanked river that was edged with moss-laden cypress trees, but we also visited Natchez, Mississippi – which remains in something of a time-warp. We stayed in an antebellum home lush with fine antiques and walked along the vastness that is the great Mississippi River.
I’ve been told I have wanderlust. Perhaps I do, for even though I daily rejoice over the fact that I get to live in this place to which no adjectives do justice, I am scarcely back from one new excursion when I am musing about another.
But as I write this, I view sun-streamed mountains as a backdrop to my yard’s budding trees, and I am content.
We are only visitors here.
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