Open-Road Trip

I write this at the beginning of a road trip around the country to visit family -and soak in the landscapes between. We're lucky to have family living in so many interesting places: the rural shores of the Upper Great Lakes in Northern Michigan, the Open Range/High Plains of Western Wyoming, up against the Rocky Mountains of Colorado's Front Range, the rolling prairies of Eastern Kansas, and the musty old river town at the boundary of the East and the West, St. Louis, Missouri.

Every time I mention a drive across the plains someone groans with sympathy, but it's always been one of my favorite regions in the world to explore! The geography there is so rich; and made all the more so because it is so overlooked. I have goose bumps for the big sky ahead...

aerogramme outlook

Although these past several months that the blog was asleep have seen Jen and I make a transition back to the United States, I refuse to take my foot out of the doorway! For now we're living in a beautiful old house in an interesting part of Poughkeepsie, New York. The neighborhood, the city, and the Hudson Valley offer a lot of rich opportunities for geographic exploration. We're back on familiar territory, but now there's an opportunity to see it and describe it all as a traveller.

As I collected a lot of details and photos those last few months in Budapest while this blog drifted off, I still have a few things to share. Over the months ahead I'll look for ways of incorporating those things into whatever's going on at present. I hope to sprinkle the blog with little items picked up this Spring in New York, Texas, and Michigan as well. Since arriving in New York in March I've learned a little about contrasting priorities regarding quality of life. We loved Budapest and our own lives there so much that I have little doubt the eight months we lived there wont be our last.

As Jen and I plan our future and continue to look for ways to break travel out of its two-weeks-a-year confinement -blending it permanently into our everyday lives- I hope to continue sharing it all here.