Travel always seemed to be someone else’s dream.  It was picking up a magazine at the grocery store promising azure seas and billowing winds blowing a beautiful woman’s crisply pressed maxi dress wildly in the breeze.  Travel was the thoughtfulness of our noble vagabonds who drift place to place and tell us about local cuisine juxtaposed with the social stories of the exotic locales.  Travel was listening to a friend or colleague sigh heavily as they recalled the places from which they just returned and those to which they could not wait to get back.

 

So how did I go from wistful to someone who made travel their dream?  Have you heard the mantra “Live.  Laugh.  Love?”  I guess my secret is to “Work. Build. Enjoy.” which is much less glamourous and not likely to hang in your entry way as a life mantra plaque covered in bejeweled seashells.  But, if anyone is looking for a take-way catchphrase to embroidery on their pillow then I would suggest the following:  SHARING IS CARING.

 

Years ago, I heard a tour guide repeat the phrase “sharing is caring.”  Those three words redefined my viewpoint of travel.  Maybe working hard at school, business, life, relationships was not the reason I was gifted with the ability to travel.  Maybe, just maybe, the reason I get to travel is because I’m supposed to share those experiences with others.  Maybe, in my small way, through this website, I can inspire someone else to want more.  Maybe, a picture you see here will inspire you to want to go somewhere you never dreamed.  

 

In creating this website, I wanted to not only share the beautiful pictures but also the practicality of travels.  Guess what?  That perfectly pressed billowy dress on the front cover of the grocery store magazine?  Remember that?  Yeah, real travel either includes some wrinkles or extra weight for a steam iron.  Those noble vagabonds?  Wonderful people that they are but they still have writers and producers and location scouts. Real travel is messy.  It’s long flights, wrinkled clothes, missed connections, lost luggage, language barriers, and a whole host of things that go wrong.

 

But how great is travel when it goes right?  My husband and I went to Greece earlier this year.  I’ll go into a lot more detail in future posts but one stop on our trip was Santorini.  The wild violet hues of the sunset of Santorini haunted me from a calendar I saw when I was twelve years old.  Years later – and I mean years later – I finally got to see my sunset.  We spent an afternoon sitting in a hot tub overlooking the caldera of the island while we watched to the sun ignite in the sky to golden, to red, to purple, and then to twilight.  It made the lost luggage, delayed flight, long haul of too much luggage, and oppressive crowds worth it.  

 

Next Time I Go is a website dedicated to sharing the joys of traveling, the mishaps of traveling, and what I would do differently when and if I get to go again.  I’ve spent the better part of my adult life doing the “Work. Build. Enjoy.”  Hopefully, through this site, we can focus on the “Live. Laugh. Love.” of travel together.