Ways to walk

In the past year, I've walked about a fair amount. I walked around Europe and the Midwest. I've walked with my boyfriend, who became my fiance, who bought me a puppy and now I walk with the puppy. I walked in the past of the family I'm about to join and I walk daily in preparations for the future. Traveled by plane and train and automobile to the village of my fiance's grandfather, the village from which he fled the Nazis, to see his home, the river and the castle and the hillside to which he brought his wife, forty years - a concentration camp, an ocean, a different life - later.

I've primarily walked in great comfort. I've walked off temper tantrums and sluggish moods. Through rain storms and in the tremendous snows of the past winter.

Within all these varied walkings I've neglected the writings, the ruminatings, the documenting - here at least. The journaling was neglected, too, and the other blog, but oh, the living.....the living has been fabulous.

Wishing For Warmer Weather

This video was taken last May along the ocean front walk in Ogunquit, MN. The day before had been 70's and we were on the beach, but this little resort town was great to get away to for a pre-season weekend. And it reminds me that...

I'm really, really, really, really looking forward to:

• Vacation
• Spring
• The Ocean

I'm so sick and tired of winter that I can't be more articulate than that.

(This also proves I will most likely not be a television presenter on the Travel Channel anytime soon!)

When we saw the sky coming up around the north side of the Nelson-Atkins Museum, we had to pull into the circle drive and take a few pictures. The Sculpture Lawn is one of my favorite places in Kansas City. I love the buildings, with their distinctive architectural concepts, I love the large, well maintained green space, and I love the view of it and from it. I love sitting on the benches that surround the lawn and watching people play games of pickup Ultimate and football, following the slope of the lawn all the way down to Theis Park and Brush Creek, the sculptures that dot the landscape, especially the shuttlecocks that are so familiar to a KansasCitian.

Tomorrow

Tomorrow the weather looks promising - sunny and about 50 degrees - so I intend to get out and enjoy it. I have been too long inside, with the holidays and the working and the coldness (of which I am extremely pathetic about), and I hope to run my errands in such a way as to make them adventurous. I have to go to the drug store, bank, and library, but perhaps I can check out an art store, a new boutique, or see how the rose garden is looking so far this winter.

I also have many projects beckoning me to stay inside and complete, but hopefully the allure of sunny warmish weather will override my procrastination. Maybe....maybe I'll even do everything on my list. And then, as a reward, tramp through the urban wilderness. To some people that might not seem like much of a reward, but walking through the city is always interesting.

The last time I took a tramp was the day after the election. I swear the air itself was celebrating -everything seemed elated - and I'm not even a huge supporter. I voted for him, yes, but there ended my support. I'm just not that in to politics, sorry. But the world did seem like a better place. That could have been the strangly balmy air in November, but that is how it felt, regardless of political leanings.

I love "discovering" a place in a city. Of course, in a city you are never the first person to find something. Others have seen it, others have been there. But to come across something you never knew existed, and has never come up in conversation, and seems to have materialised from the ether -there are so many of these things in cities -new places, new things, new people - and they are always new to someone. In a neighborhood a couple of months ago, I came across some urban conservation preserve, a house, in a fairly discreet neighborhood, which was left to grow untended, as in nature. The "lawn" was covered with ground cover and the dried stalks of wildflowers, the trees were shady. There was a path through the yard to the front porch, beckoning the weary traveler to step "inside" this wilderness, and enjoy the rejuvenating power of nature. And it was on the corner of Charlotte and 57th.

So tomorrow, that future time in which all things are possible, I will be out in the world, discovering things, new and old, for myself.

Dandelion

Earlier this month, a typical frigid and uninspiring January day, I was walking across one of the large lawns that are ubiqitous of college campuses, when I spied, amidst the dead grasses and fallen leaves, a lone dandelion. We had had one brief warm day, somewhere in the mid fifties, and that was enough for this little guy to show his face.

I instantly pulled out my camera to capture his bravery, knowing that a cold day was coming and his reward for trying to get a little sun and warmth would to be frozen at the roots again, shriveled and dying.

To read on, please visit this link.

Plans

In less than two months, I will be traveling down the streets of Brussels. Why Brussels, when all of Europe and beyond beckons? Why this small, and from many accounts, unassuming city as a destination? The best reason of all.....to visit friends!

I wish I could conveniently position friends and relations in all the corners and cracks in the world. To stay with a (semi) native, someone who knows the area, who knows where the best restaraunts are, the times for the market, how to get from Point A to Point B to Point C, and most importantly knows when the bars open, that - if I can't be a native myself - can save all the time and bother of trying to acclimate oneself to a new town. And let's not forget the savings on hotels!

I've been reading up on Brussels in preparation for the trip and the information is a little disheartening.....many books say things like, "Paris (Amsterdam, Bruges, London, Antwerp, Prague) is only a train ride away." Surely there's more to the town than that! I think my favorite quote so far is from Bill Bryson's Neither Here Nor There in which he says something to the effect of "I walked around the Grand Place and took in all the sites....and then wondered if 9:47 in the morning was to early to start drinking." Though, why not? One of Brussels best draws is its famous and delicious beers. When in Belguim.....

Even though the tourist books and travelogues aren't being helpful, the best part about the town is what can't be written. What I love about Europe is the hidden corners, the stumbled-upon treasures that seem created just for you - whether it's a particular fountain, or the store that stole your heart, or the friendly native who doesn't speak any English but is overwhelmed to try what he does know on you. And there is always my favorite game - be understood in a language you don't speak. It can cause some interesting times, I assure you.

In my week of travel, I know we'll spend one day in Germany, visiting my boyfriend's grandfather's home and hopefully one or two days in a neighboring city. But I'm most looking forward to walking the streets and imagining what it would be like to walk these streets every day. I plan to take tons of pictures and make lots of memories. And maybe buy a thing or two that's really Belgian. That's my type of adventure.

Via Imagination

Since I've been without the funds or time to do much exotic traveling lately, I have indulged my wanderlust with travelogues (which in my extensive research I have found that travel writing is not synonomous with travelogues. I will continue to misuse that word, regardless.). They take me places I want to go when I don't have time or money, places I don't want to go, places I've never heard of, places that might not exist anymore, even some places so foriegn to my worldview that they seem like make believe tales.

Sometimes these can be dry, sometimes ridiculous, but almost always captivating in that they are true stories of people, maybe not so different than myself, with not so different a background, people who have had those adventures, who have seen those sites, who have not only lived to tell about it, but took the time to write it down and make it a tale worth telling.

Though I always have a few new (and some old) books that I'm working through (even when backpacking in Europe I brought about four books with me. I only read them on the trains, I swear. And that one time in Zurich when I was tired and sick of looking at cathedrals and so I sat on a bench to wait for my companions.), there are still a few books that I've read more than twice, books that excite my wanderlust even as I try to sate it. If you are an armchair traveler like I sometimes am, I hope that these can help the long dark months between journeys.

The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton is my premier travel inspiration. Though more about the pyschological and emotional aspects of traveling than about the pedantic "how I got there and what I saw" logistics, Botton addresses the reasons we travel and what we hope to achieve by going somewhere. By taking different elements of travel and associating those elements with the journeys of those who have gone before, so to speak, he sets the tone for an introspective approach to traveling. I think it essential reading for the veteran traveler as well as the novice before the start of a journey.

Freya Stark is always an inspiration, though it is often difficult to find her writings. I am lucky enough to have access to a university library, but then her work comes in large tomes. Originally, her books where published as smaller editions, easily slipped into one's saddlebag or Aba. Her writing is frank and precise, as she had the roles of diplomat, surveyor, and lady to reconcile. Not only is the timing of her travel and writing impressive, but her attention to detail, both culturally and physically, recreates a rapidly disappearing lifestyle and people.

A Journey Around My Bedroom by Xavier de Maistre is a new favorite. Not only is it original and entertaining, but it reads quickly and succinctly. For something to still read fresh and contemporary when it was written nearly two hundred years ago speaks for itself in our fast paced, here today gone tomorrow world. And it adds a new dimension to travel - that of not traveling. I have yet to read to secondary volume, A Nocturnal Journey Around My Room, but I look forward to further exploring with de Maistre.

Paul Theroux is another author I cannot read enough. In his writing I find a timeless quality and also a grit that is lacking in many modern "travel adventures". He sets out on a journey with a goal or destination in mind and simply records what happens. Theroux doesn't shirk from describing the unfortunate sides of travel as they are, annoyances, potentially harmful, and doesn't pretend that sometimes the people you meet are as bad as the tales they told you at home. But he tempers this reality check of the glamore of travel by being honest, being descriptive, and being slyly humorous.

More and more authors are added daily, by the hour so it seems, but these are a few I return to when I really need to go somewhere far away.