What can you do while traveling so that once you return – once you’re back in the thick of work routines and responsibilities – you can still remember the piquant flavors and the thousand other little details not found in a guidebook?
As grateful as I am for experiences like walking the Camino across Spain, there have been other trips I’m not quite so proud of – trips on which I didn’t work hard enough to engage with where I was.
When people find out that I usually travel alone, so often the first question they ask is, “Don’t you ever get lonely?” What surprises me is the terribly concerned look on their face, as though loneliness is something to be afraid of.
Every now and then you meet someone whose friendship not only proves the test of time, but of distance, too. Today I want you to meet Micaela, one such friend whose questions before her first solo trip inspired this new blog series.
I had no idea what to expect on Vieques Island, but what awaited me were vivid hibiscus flowers. Verdant hills covered in palm and mango trees. Garlands of shell ginger blossoms, their buds white and each tip a light shade of flamingo pink.
As Aziz leads me farther through the dyers market, I feel a familiar tension coming back. During my time earlier with the blacksmiths, as interested as I was in their work, I couldn’t help asking myself: Are they doing this for me?
Flamenco wasn’t on my list of things to see in Spain. But when a performance unexpectedly started at lunch one day in Madrid, I suddenly couldn’t imagine having left the country without seeing this.
My time in the village of Åre, Sweden, was supposed to be about skiing, but what I found myself exploring with as much energy as the piste was the Swedish cuisine of the Jämtland region – from savory reindeer meat to tangy cloudberries.
Some journeys feel more like a poem in their brevity, in the way they leave you with not so much a discernible storyline as a collection of images – fleeting impressions that stay visible in your mind long after you’ve left. My time on Mallorca was just that.
I’ve been grateful to feel at home in Madrid, to not only have my own room again, but a desk to write at and an armchair to read in, all while sounds of the city and afternoon sunshine waft in through open windows.