I haven’t made a single plan. No tickets have been bought;
no rooms have been reserved. I don’t even have a passport. Yet here I am
writing a travel blog about a trip that is nearly a year away.
Kids have the right idea. Escaping the everyday into a reality
that is just as real as the one we see and yet completely their own. A kid
growing up in the 1990’s in Virginia can, in the blink of an eye, be
transported anywhere and become anyone. That is the beauty, the magic of
imagination. It’s a child’s ability to turn a straw into a scalpel and a
hobbyhorse into a stallion, to take an inch and run a mile a minute into a land
of story of their own making. It’s no wonder children can never seem to sit
still. And yet as we grow up we seem to lose that sense of wonder and
excitement, of boundless creativity.
We become content to settle into routine and let the world around us
dictate the reality we perceive, instead of going out and creating a world we
actually want to live in.
What does this have to do with travel? It all starts with a
dream and a desire: a dream of half-remembered, half-invented worlds and the
desire to find them again.
