Why I Love Travel

When Mary Polly and I left a couple of weeks ago for our Mediterranean cruise, we knew it was going to be the trip of a lifetime.

In the months and years leading up to taking this trip, our expectations for this adventure had grown to such daunting proportions that a part of me worried a little bit inside that we had built the experience up so much that it couldn’t possibly deliver all the dreams, imagined and unimagined, that we were attaching to it.

Truly, I need not have worried.

Getting lost along the way and encountering kinks in my laboriously researched plans were all just part of the journey. In many ways, those are the moments that make a trip into memorable adventure.

The setting of the sea and the exquisitely beautiful ports we visited were so magnificent that all we really had to do was get out of bed and walk outside in order to be amazed.

On the plane ride over we made final lists of what we didn’t want to miss, and on the way home, we looked back over these lists and laughed about how we had ended up skipping some of our “not to be missed” sights in exchange for other pleasures.

We could not have guessed ahead of time which moments would take our breath away, and we had to wait and see which places would be the ones to stay in our hearts forever.

Mary Polly was going through her pictures yesterday afternoon and she kept saying, Mom, it’s like it was all a dream.  I’m looking at these pictures and I can’t even believe they are real.

I just nodded because I know.  I have felt the same way.  I’ve been a little bit tentative about jumping back into my life, because I’m afraid of losing this hold on my current enchantment with how very beautiful the world is.

I’m so incredibly grateful for getting to see new facets of its beauty.

And I cannot even describe the overflowing of my heart that is happening right now when I look at Mary Polly and remember that we got to share this amazing voyage with one another.