By Janice Lindsay
Contributing Writer
Why do people travel? Why do we leave our familiar surroundings and the comfort of families and friends to venture into places unknown to us?
It was early morning, June, warm, sunny. My husband and I were in Tennessee. We had visited a tiny gift shop on a winding country road in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. The shop nestled in a little hollow, surrounded by hills that were lush and green. Wildflowers bloomed. Birds sang morning songs. It was a perfect day.
I had finished shopping before Dick, and I waited for him near our car.
There was one other car in the parking lot, next to ours, where another woman stood, waiting for her husband.
I said, “Isn’t this a lovely spot?”
She looked at our surroundings with distaste. “Better than the place we were in last week.”
“Where were you last week?”
“Arizona. Nothing there but sand and rocks.”
I asked where she was from.
“Maryland,” she replied, looking around once more with disgust, “where it’s nice and flat, and we don’t have these awful hills to climb all the time.”
I didn’t say anything, but I sure was thinking: “If you want every place to be like Maryland, why don’t you stay in Maryland and leave the rest of the country to people who appreciate it?” Her husband’s arrival saved us from further conversation.
Silly me, thinking that people travel to experience places that are different from home.
When we were younger and before Dick took sick, we traveled once or twice a year.
Our method was to combine two types of vacations into a two-week visit.
For the first week, we signed up for a hike. On a guided walking tour, you might not see many places, but you see them slowly and fully. Local guides love the place and can teach you a lot about it.
For the second week, we rented a car and became tourists. With an AAA guide book and brochures we found in motels, we saw more places, but not in such depth as on a hike.
And, with this method, a few years after our sojourn in Tennessee and my conversation with that unappreciative traveler, we found ourselves in Arizona where she had seen “nothing but sand and rocks.”
During our hiking week, we walked in the Sonoran desert. We saw sand and rocks, yes, but also saguaro cactus, the tall thin cactus with arms that you see in cowboy movies. We watched cactus wrens that build nests in the saguaro. We examined red spotted toads, a hairy tarantula, and a tiny rattlesnake curled under a rock. We identified several kinds of butterflies and many kinds of birds. We studied pictographs made by ancient people. We enjoyed the multi-colored desert sunset, and explored the sculptured rock formations of the Chiracahua mountains.
After the hike, we rented a car at Tucson, drove north, and glimpsed the mystical red rock formations of Sedona. We drove along the south rim of the Grand Canyon, toured Hoover Dam, and visited Lake Havasu City, the final resting place of London Bridge, which was dismantled piece by piece and reconstructed in the Arizona desert.
To us, it was a new world—fascinating, magical, enchanting, and the desert was a little scary. It wasn’t at all like the Massachusetts we had left behind. And that, of course, was the point.
St. Augustine wrote, “The world is a book. Those who do not travel have read only one page.” That lady from Maryland shows that you can lead a person to a book, but you can’t make her read it. Life is so much more fascinating for those who do.
Contact jlindsay@tidewater.net
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