Last 30 Days of My Thirties: Blog 3 - The Traveler

The decade of my thirties was the decade of travel.  The primary reason is that my employer began offering an incentive trip tied to our annual revenue goals.  Through their generosity and our team’s hard work, I have been taken to Cancun, Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Orlando (okay it was the year of the recession), and a dude ranch in Colorado – all expenses paid.  I never would have had the opportunity to travel to these places otherwise. 

 

I saw and experienced some really amazing things on those trips, including:

 

·         Riding a horse through the jungle and into the ocean in Cancun

·         Eating on a rooftop Mexican restaurant, complete with a mariachi band and a view of Cozumel across the water from Playa del Carmen

·         The most beautiful, warm people filled with hospitality and kindness in Jamaica

·         Walking up the waterfalls in Ocho Rios, Jamaica

·         Two ridiculously fun nights at discotheques in Jamaica and the Dominican Republic

·         A private island in Puerto Rico

·         The bioluminescent bay in Puerto Rico

·         Breathtaking scenery, trap shooting, and archery in Granby, Colorado at the dude ranch

In my thirties, I also traveled to Canada, to the Bahamas (won a free trip) with my roommate from OSU, to San Diego by myself to see two friends from grad school (amazing trip with a spa offering mud baths, a gay country line dancing bar, and the best massage ever from my grad school roommate who opened her own massage business), and to Austin with a friend for a week of fantastic “eats and beats.”

Even after all of this, my three favorite vacation destinations are: South Central Virginia, East Coast beaches (Virginia and Myrtle), and Gatlinburg, TN. 

 

Virginia is where you will find all but my immediate family.  As a kid, twice a year we would go there for our vacations.  The importance of family was instilled in me at an early age.  Sometimes when we’d go for a week in the summer, my parents would leave my brother and I behind  in VA, and we were over the moon to spend a week with our grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles.  It’s a completely different world from the large Midwestern city where I reside, but it feels like home to me.  The scenery is beautiful, the people are colorful and hospitable, and even the smell is soothing to me.  Virginia, to me, is dirt roads, lots of tiny churches with their own cemeteries, large family gatherings, laughter, the best food in the world, hearing stories about days gone by, or just sitting on MeMa’s front porch listening to the whippoorwills, raising my head at the rare sound of a car passing down on the road below the hill on which she lives.  Still I make the 1,000 mile roundtrip drive at least once a year – sometimes by myself.

 

Gatlinburg was where my ex-husband and I spent half of our honeymoon (the other half in Nashville), and we returned every fall for our anniversary, eventually with children - even when our son was a mere 6 weeks old.  I fell in love with those Smoky Mountains in the fall.  It looked like God had taken the most beautiful blanket and draped it over the landscape.  It was peaceful, breathtaking, and it restores my soul to be there.  After my divorce, I still vacationed there alone with the kids or with friends.  The beauty of those Smoky Mountains is awesome, literally.  It’s been a few years since I’ve visited, but I intend to return this fall if at all possible.

My first trip to the beach was when I was 17, believe it or not.  In Pretty Woman, Edward says, "People's reactions to opera the first time they see it is very dramatic; they either love it or they hate it. If they love it, they will always love it. If they don't, they may learn to appreciate it, but it will never become part of their soul."  That is how the beach is to me.  I will never forget when my eyes first rested on it.  The enormity, the magnificence, the power, the SOUND of it.....it completely captured me.  There is nowhere on earth I feel the presence of God more strongly than at the beach.  I just can't fathom how you could deny the existence or the power of God once you've stood on a shoreline of an ocean.  As the song sung at my daughter's baptism goes, "I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean." 

Isn't that what travel is all about?