All this is to say that I love geography, traveling, and adventures large and small. Being from the small town of Edgewood, New Mexico has been an enormous boon for two reasons: 1) I had a terrific childhood full of family, friends, mountains, reading, animals, and wide open spaces; 2) It takes very little to entertain or delight me. When you leave the world of not-much-is-happening-unless-you-make-it and enter a world full of people, cultures, and the arts, you realize that your past was dear both because it was personal and yours and because now you’ll never be bored. This is no way meant to say that my childhood was boring, just that it prepared me to see the world with eyes wide open.
Due to a strange mixture of providence and luck – at least, I naively think it was both – I happen to have a job now that enables me to travel a fair bit and to live in Rome, Italy several months of the year. I’ve been to various Italian towns and cities, Austria, England, Spain, France, and Portugal and hope to hit a few more countries before I finish this June. I’ve met a lot of interesting (even colorful?) folks along the way, seen crazy, dirty, and beautiful things, and learned quite a bit. Hopefully I’ve grown as a person as well, but that isn’t as easily measured in photographs or pins on a map. The purpose of this blog is to give others a chance to see from afar some of the places and things I've experienced and to delight in them as well. In the telling of some of my humble adventures – because in the grand scheme of things, all of them have been fairly tame thus far – there are some points where it might just make the reader glad to be in a comfy chair and to have a home and a bed, a fully stocked kitchen, and a country full of people that speak the same language. If this gives you some joy, then I don’t begrudge you your gratitude a bit. With any luck I’ll have the same one day when I pack away my old brown suitcase in the attic and settle down to a routine.
As I go through countries, stories, chance meetings, and some food for thought, I won’t necessarily be going in a chronological manner. If this will aggravate you, now would probably be the ideal time to turn your attention to something orderly and structured like a grammar manual or a history of the American West, both of which would be very good in their own ways. I’ll be dealing with topics as I can and as I’m ready and not before. I’ve heard it said that a blog is like a small kingdom…and as your local queen, I’ll be conducting things in my own haphazard way.
A presto!
