Musings

Ok, so this being one of my introductory stories, let me just say that I am mildly offended by the community of travelers for not letting me in on this great and wonderful secret:  there are Faraway Lands!  I'm just kidding about the being offended part, it's just that I stumbled on this open world like a fifty dollar bill on the sidewalk and it's enchanted me even worse than that senorita from the Lounge bar that one night.  It has always existed to me in romantic terms, in the distance, a place just a little bit seperated from reality, which consisted of suburbia and life lived in books.  The World was always there, but we can take hold of it?!  We can go out and make it our own, the romance and the dreams, make our own adventures and spin them into stories lived before our eyes!  I've got a good bit of distance under my belt, above average I guess.  Obviously the America stuff, twenty plus states, East Coast, Gulf, New York, childhood in St. Louis and the beginning and bulk of my life in grand, storied Texas (though California and the West Coast is admittedly the gaping hole in my resume).  But the real travel all started with a ten-day medical mission trip up the Amazon River starting in Manaus last summer, and since then I've become involved with a nonprofit called Full Hearts at Texas A&M working in Mexico almost every weekend, and after the year ended a few friends and I took a two and half week trip through said beautiful country in an old renovated RV and I swear it was a miracle that it survived the trip, or that we survived the trip more like it.  But that all happened in the last year, and its all just the beginning, I know.  Just recently I've discovered the phenomenom of hostels (who knew there were so many of ya'll, who don't have any money either?).  I'm just at the start of what's sure to be a long book of postcards and sunsets from every corner of the globe and its exciting.  Thank you, community of like-minded people, for daring to Go - like Augustine said, "The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page."  This is my pilgrimage and my story.  See ya'll on the road!