Thoughts on World Travel
Do you worry, as I do, about the poor souls who nurse insufferable passions that don't match reality? You've seen them, for example, on American Idol. They feel such a need to sing, despite the fact that most folks would pay good money to avoid having to hear them sing. You cannot keep these types from singing; they'll go raving mad. Talent's got nothing to do with it; it's passion.
For other people, that passion is dancing, or boxing, or doing quadratic equations. Others have to outsmart bad guys; others must tend green things, or paint, or ride horses. Talent, capability, budget constraints or other reality checks don't seem to figure in to this need. Do you know what I'm talking about? What's your insufferable passion?
Well. I have a few. But one of mine is travel.
I've been very lucky. Because my father was a pilot and we could fly for free, I've been practically everywhere! I've watched the sheep grazing on the Isle of Lewis, Scotland. I've gazed into the Mona Lisa's eyes in Paris. I've hiked up and stood inside the Statue of Liberty. I've seen the pandas at the Tokyo zoo and I've ridden on a giant tortoise on the Seychelles Islands. I've touched the Berlin Wall. I've fed birds at the Eiffel Tower. I've pulled a rolling suitcase across cobblestone streets in Stockholm, Edinburgh, and Berlin. I've swum with manatees in Florida. I've been scuba diving with barracudas. I once stayed in an African hotel where ostriches and zebras paced outside the window.
I've eaten snails at Ile aux Moines, France; an island so small that cars are outlawed and everyone has to bike or walk. I have witnessed the New Year's Eve beach festivities in Rio De Janeiro, (roses buried in the sand as an offering for a goddess of the sea.) I've eaten a barbeque with Goucho cowboys on a Buenos Aires ranch. I've been to Denmark's Legoland, Florida's Gatorland, and Utah's Dinosaur Museum. I've seen the movie stars, the hobos and the gangsters of California. I've seen ghettos in St. Louis, Chicago, and New York. I could go on and on and on, but I'll stop here.
Today I live in a little hick town in Utah, and I have neither money, free flight privileges, or a job that requires me to fly anywhere. The furthest I've gone in the past five years has been the adjoining state, Colorado. But I do travel --yes, indeed. There are truly innumerable ways to make it happen.
--How do you pull it off, you ask?
We can change our attitudes about what defines travel. We can change our definitions of what defines vacation. Traveling and tourism are simply a slice of life. We are all visitors to this planet. Travel is what we all do, every time we walk to the mailbox, every time we notice a leaf, every time we look into the eyes of another human being. It's not really about where you go, but it is about how you see. How do you see the place where you stand today? It's opening your eyes. It's seizing the day. It's a state of mind.
My kids don't know that they're not spoiled, not flying to foreign lands, because we are always traveling; it's our state of mind.
We treat local historical sites with as much reverence as we would a trip to the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal, the Cliffs of Dover, or Waterloo. We pick up our own local travel brochures, and peruse them as if we were from another country, looking in. We observe people; we talk about what we see, what we eat, what we would think of this place if we weren't living a mile or a hundred miles from here.
In the past year or two we've road-tripped to the rodeo at the "Strawberry Days" of Pleasant Grove, Utah; to the Alpenhorn blowing at "Swiss Days" of Midway, Utah; to the Swedish meatball eating at "Scandinavian Days" of Ephraim, Utah; to the wooden gun whittling of the "Cowboy Poetry Days" of Heber, Utah; and we've tasted the fresh pressed cider at "Apple Fest" of Cedaredge, Colorado. We've even found a little cemetery only thirty miles away with an incredibly fascinating history that I'll have to blog about another day...
Life is fascinating. Everything around us. It really is.
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