Prologue to a Journey

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.