catch the trade winds in your sails
A little while ago, I asked for writing topic suggestions to help me get back into the habit of posting here. I received a few, and combined with old December meme posts that I am still behind on, I think I've got enough to be going on with for a bit, starting with this one by 
gramarye1971: Do you have any interesting upcoming holidays/vacations planned?
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
- Mark Twain
While I've been known to take a few days off and spend them at home (for various reasons), to me a true vacation will always include some kind of travel. It doesn't have to be a long trip; it doesn't even necessarily have to always be somewhere new. For example, I'm writing this now across from
agonistes at a familiar table at Coal Creek Coffee, in Laramie, Wyoming, alternately looking out the window at the blue sky and watching the trains go by at the end of the road.
I've written a little before before about how I feel about the various landscapes of Wyoming and Colorado, and it's no less true today. The day is utterly clear, without even the haze that sometimes develops against the mountains, and one can see for miles upon miles. It's interesting, because I know that not everyone likes the open landscape in this region; some people have said that it feels like the blue vault of the sky is pressing down on them like a weight, crushing them into the earth and making them feel very small. For me, it's the exact opposite. When I cross over from the urban environment into the grasslands, it sometimes feels that everything around me expands into welcoming space, space in which I'm able to breathe deeply and freely.
(Don't get me wrong - I like the city, and I love Denver. But there's something about the wildness of mountain and plain that I find soothing, all the way to the depths of my soul.)
Anyway, getting back to the original question, I can't think of anything better to spend time and money on than travel. I've been fortunate enough to have visited 16 countries in addition to many places in the United States. Travel has given me some of the most wonderful experiences in my life, and it's something that I have never, never regretted.
A glance at my calendar so far this year shows that I've both planned and done much more in the way of long weekend trips than I have in terms of longer vacations. Previous trips of that kind that I still need to write up include four days in west Tennessee and three days in Santa Barbara, California; future ones include a trip to east Tennessee in October for my cousin's wedding, a possible Vegas weekend, and the upcoming planned Labor Day weekend in Georgia (as usual).
Longer trips are a little harder for me to manage, but well worth it. For example, three weeks ago - after a bit of a wild work-related spiral that nearly led to me cancelling the trip - I arrived in the Lake Tahoe area to join friends for a week's vacation. (The length of this year's vacation may be a relative thing in my case, as I ended up working for three of those days, but the principle still applies, and it was much more fun to be working in Tahoe than it'd have been to be doing the same work elsewhere.) This is the same group of friends that I spent a week with in Maine last year, and the same group of friends that I'm planning a trip to Spain with for next year. I'd never been to the Sierra Nevadas before, and I'd definitely never seen that lake, other than in pictures. The country there is gorgeous, with so much more to offer than I'd ever imagined - including wine tours, crystal clear deep blue waters and beautiful bays, miles and miles of hiking trails, colorful sunsets and brilliantly starry skies that were lit up at different times with fireworks, planetary conjunctions, and the soft glow of the Milky Way. Overall, the vacation itself was absolutely wonderful, an utter delight in ways both expected and very unexpected, and I'm glad I went.
As for upcoming longer trips -- while I tend to plan these further in advance, there's also room to squeeze in things on a more impulsive basis (as I did last year with the trip to Belfast). Things in varying stages of planning at the moment include Spain next year, hopefully a birthday celebration at Disneyworld for the sheer fun of it the year after that, Scotland at some point because I have always wanted to go and I cannot believe I have not yet been -- maybe I'll do that if Disney falls through -- and a trip to Cologne, Germany this fall.
Whew. I think that's about it for the moment, and I also think that I'm very fortunate to have wandered so much of this wide world. I can't wait to get started on exploring the rest of it.
This entry was originally posted at http://silveraspen.dreamwidth.org/330278.html and mirrored to LJ. Please comment where you wish! (There are
comments currently posted at Dreamwidth.)
gramarye1971: Do you have any interesting upcoming holidays/vacations planned?
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
- Mark Twain
While I've been known to take a few days off and spend them at home (for various reasons), to me a true vacation will always include some kind of travel. It doesn't have to be a long trip; it doesn't even necessarily have to always be somewhere new. For example, I'm writing this now across from
agonistes at a familiar table at Coal Creek Coffee, in Laramie, Wyoming, alternately looking out the window at the blue sky and watching the trains go by at the end of the road.
I've written a little before before about how I feel about the various landscapes of Wyoming and Colorado, and it's no less true today. The day is utterly clear, without even the haze that sometimes develops against the mountains, and one can see for miles upon miles. It's interesting, because I know that not everyone likes the open landscape in this region; some people have said that it feels like the blue vault of the sky is pressing down on them like a weight, crushing them into the earth and making them feel very small. For me, it's the exact opposite. When I cross over from the urban environment into the grasslands, it sometimes feels that everything around me expands into welcoming space, space in which I'm able to breathe deeply and freely.
(Don't get me wrong - I like the city, and I love Denver. But there's something about the wildness of mountain and plain that I find soothing, all the way to the depths of my soul.)
Anyway, getting back to the original question, I can't think of anything better to spend time and money on than travel. I've been fortunate enough to have visited 16 countries in addition to many places in the United States. Travel has given me some of the most wonderful experiences in my life, and it's something that I have never, never regretted.
A glance at my calendar so far this year shows that I've both planned and done much more in the way of long weekend trips than I have in terms of longer vacations. Previous trips of that kind that I still need to write up include four days in west Tennessee and three days in Santa Barbara, California; future ones include a trip to east Tennessee in October for my cousin's wedding, a possible Vegas weekend, and the upcoming planned Labor Day weekend in Georgia (as usual).
Longer trips are a little harder for me to manage, but well worth it. For example, three weeks ago - after a bit of a wild work-related spiral that nearly led to me cancelling the trip - I arrived in the Lake Tahoe area to join friends for a week's vacation. (The length of this year's vacation may be a relative thing in my case, as I ended up working for three of those days, but the principle still applies, and it was much more fun to be working in Tahoe than it'd have been to be doing the same work elsewhere.) This is the same group of friends that I spent a week with in Maine last year, and the same group of friends that I'm planning a trip to Spain with for next year. I'd never been to the Sierra Nevadas before, and I'd definitely never seen that lake, other than in pictures. The country there is gorgeous, with so much more to offer than I'd ever imagined - including wine tours, crystal clear deep blue waters and beautiful bays, miles and miles of hiking trails, colorful sunsets and brilliantly starry skies that were lit up at different times with fireworks, planetary conjunctions, and the soft glow of the Milky Way. Overall, the vacation itself was absolutely wonderful, an utter delight in ways both expected and very unexpected, and I'm glad I went.
As for upcoming longer trips -- while I tend to plan these further in advance, there's also room to squeeze in things on a more impulsive basis (as I did last year with the trip to Belfast). Things in varying stages of planning at the moment include Spain next year, hopefully a birthday celebration at Disneyworld for the sheer fun of it the year after that, Scotland at some point because I have always wanted to go and I cannot believe I have not yet been -- maybe I'll do that if Disney falls through -- and a trip to Cologne, Germany this fall.
Whew. I think that's about it for the moment, and I also think that I'm very fortunate to have wandered so much of this wide world. I can't wait to get started on exploring the rest of it.
This entry was originally posted at http://silveraspen.dreamwidth.org/330278.html and mirrored to LJ. Please comment where you wish! (There are
comments currently posted at Dreamwidth.)