Travels

My late cousin’s wife loves to travel, especially overseas. She has been to many countries in Europe and was most recently in London. Her plans will soon take her to Sicily (she’s been there before) and then on to four more countries. I can’t recall all their names but I know Nepal is one of them. I think another one is Bhutan, which makes sense because it borders Nepal so it’s right there in the neighborhood.

You can see sights over there that you can’t see in the USA. But America is a vast country and it borders another vast country—Canada. There are so many places and things to see in America. You could spend years traveling in America and not run out of places to see. People come here from all over the world to see just a few of these amazing places.

I’ve done some traveling in America. I’ve driven over the Rocky Mountains and down into the city of Red Lodge, Montana. I drove through Yellowstone Park and watched Old Faithful spouting and visited the beautiful, colorful hot springs. I camped in New York’s Adirondack mountains and swam in its crystal clear lakes. I’ve driven west across the Great Plains with its seemingly endless grasslands that extend to the horizon in every direction, and I’ve driven east across the southwestern deserts of America. I’ve driven through redwood forests in California and through beautiful Glacier Park in Montana. I’ve driven down the Pacific Coast Highway from Crescent City to Los Angeles. (On the way, I picked up a hitchhiking “biker chick” on a street corner in San Francisco and gave her a ride to L.A.) I’ve driven from Ventura to Thousand Oaks and on eastward into L.A. on the Ventura Freeway.

I happened to drive through Winslow, Arizona, just when that great Eagles song, Take It Easy, was playing on the radio. (“Well, I'm a standing on a corner In Winslow, Arizona / And such a fine sight to see / It's a girl, my lord / In a flatbed Ford / Slowin' down to take a look at me…”)

I sat on a mountaintop west of Denver and watched darkness descend on the city as the sun set behind the mountain I camped on. I watched the million lights of Denver sparkle into brightness. Lest you think I’m all nature-lover, I will add that the best stripper I’ve ever seen danced at a club in Denver! But that’s another story.

I walked beside the Grand Canyon and the Arizona meteor crater. I drove the Embarcadero along San Francisco Bay (torn down now, I think) to eat seafood in a dockside restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf. I took a cable car to the top of Mount Sandia in New Mexico. (The Mount Sandia Tramway is the third longest in the world.) There is a restaurant on the top of the mountain and I ate dinner there.

I visited Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs. It’s beautiful, but so is the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. I stood beside Niagara Falls and I walked out on a platform far above the Niagara River.

I hiked into Linville Gorge (sometimes called “the Grand Canyon of North Carolina”) and walked beside the Linville River for hours before setting up camp for the night. When I ran out of water, I drank crystal clear spring water that dripped from a huge boulder beside the river and I filled my water bottle with it. It was the most delicious water I’ve ever tasted! In Boone, North Carolina, I spent time in a house on a mountaintop. The city of Boone lay far below and when dawn arrived I found myself looking down on surrounding mountains with their valleys shrouded in early morning fog.

I stood on a beach at Hilton Head, South Carolina, and looked across the ocean waters to see the tops of buildings seemingly rising out of the water. I was seeing the tops of buildings in Savannah, Georgia, just over the horizon.

If I tried to list of all the great places I’ve been to in America, this blog post would indeed be a very long one. So I won’t do that. I simply want to point out that if it’s within your budget, you can visit many interesting places and do many interesting things without leaving America, without getting a passport, without contending with foreign languages you don’t speak, and without spending long hours on a passenger jet. And there is this: while places around the world may seem exotic to you, for the people who live in those places, America is the exotic land.