I love to travel. I also love coming home.
I’m fond of saying how lucky I am that I live in a beautiful part of the world, and I still love being reminded just how lucky I am. Thankfully, the Pacific Northwest – especially in the summer – has a brilliant way of doing that regularly. On a recent trip to Central Oregon, I had more than one occasion where I was unable to stop gasping at how gorgeous my surroundings were.
On one of those occasions, I had just come around a corner on the trail by Sparks Lake with the South Sister in the background. This is what I saw:
I look at that picture now and can’t believe the sky was that blue. But it was. The mountain looked utterly, ridiculously clear. The grasses on that island were glowing. The day was simply stunning.
I am not a collector of passport stamps, and my list of places I’ve been is woefully short compared to many of my travel writing colleagues. I do, however, always have a desire to plan whatever my next trip is, and to see as much of the world as I can.
And yet something tells me that if I spent half as much time exploring my own state as I do yearning to be elsewhere, I’d be quite content for a very long time.
