Good morning all,

I can tell we're going to have fun this month. Just reading your posts has fired up my inner "travel spirit." I love that term, Pam. It's the perfect way to describe someone hardwired with wanderlust.

Like you, I moved a lot as a kid, and those early experiences probably helped fuel my passion for travel. I wasn't a military "brat," but the daughter of a greeting card salesman. My dad would get transferred to a new city every few years, and off we'd go. By the time I hit junior high, I'd moved nine times. My sisters and I were all born in different states.

The need to travel and explore as much of the world as God would allow really kicked into overdrive when I was in college. I spent most of my junior year studying in Paris. Paris can be an unforgiving place if you're a young student living on a shoestring and struggling with the language. I often felt depressed and lonely, so I'd escape the city at every opportunity and travel to some other part of Europe for a weekend, or more, if my class schedule allowed. I discovered the beauty, culture and history of places like England, Holland, Germany, Austria, Italy. My eyes, mind and heart were opened to what's out there, and I was hooked.

Our US road trip, the "Ribbons" journey, was a powerful experience. Like Smilinize, I've always loved road travel. Traveling by car gives you enormous freedom to follow any tempting fork in the road and to go at the pace you choose.

When I was planning our cross-country journey, I created a route made up of 12,000 miles of back roads. We avoided interstates (except when they were, well, unavoidable). This, I think, is the key to really seeing a place. Get off the superhighways, the roads that serve only to move people and goods quickly from one point to another but show you nothing of the places you pass through. Taking the interstates is forward motion, not travel. Travel reveals something about the essence of a place and its people, and small routes are the magic keys that open places up to the traveler.

To help wean people off the interstates and onto the treasure-filled small routes, I've often told folks to "practice in your own backyard." Let's say you want to travel to a mall that's 20 miles from home, and you usually go by highway. Instead, grab a map and create a route that takes you through the center of every town between your house and the mall. You will, I guarantee, discover interesting things in those towns that you never knew existed. Historical homes and buildings, eyecatching architecture or landscaping, lovely parks and playgrounds, rivers and streams, interesting neighborhoods or business districts... Look at everything with the fresh eyes of a traveler, and you'll be amazed at what you find.

This post is getting long, so I'll sign off for now. I haven't forgotten Nancy's question about a favorite place or interesting person we encountered on our trip. That's a loaded question (and is, effectively, the reason I wrote the book -- to be able to collect the sights, sounds, feelings and memories of all the unique and fascinating people and places we were blessed to come across). Her question will provide fodder for many, many posts as we move through our chat this month!

Like Nancy, We loved Arizona. We have family there, so we've visited the Phoenix area many times. On our road trip, however, we spent most of our Arizona time in the northeast corner of the state, in the Navajo nation, where old women with tough-as-walnut faces sell kneel-down bread from tables in their front yards, and families haul hay for their sheep in the beds of their white pickups, the kids sitting atop the bales to keep them from blowing away, and the Kayenta Bible Church holds services and Sunday School in both English and Navajo. A nation within a nation, and proud of both.

Until next time,
Lori