Bill Bryson’s book, The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain, provided lots of interesting stories—anecdotal and historical—about a number of Britain’s small towns as he drove, walked and rode from the southern coast of the island to its northern tip. He said, “One of the things that I really, really like about Britain: it is unknowable. There is so much to it—more than any person can ever see or figure out or begin to know.”
It seemed to me that one could say that about a lot of places—nothing wrong with that—but when Bryson stood at the northern tip of Great Britain at the end of his trip, he said, “Now that I had reached the cape, I rather expected some feeling of finality and accomplishment to settle upon me…So I stood, hands clasped at my back, staring into the wind, patiently waiting, but no special feeling came.”
He affirmed what has become my default feeling about travel, best expressed—perhaps—by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who advised, “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.”
In retirement, my wife and I have traveled to a number of “exotic” (not!) locations, including:
- Point Pelee, Ontario, Canada
- Madison, Indiana
- Dayton, Ohio
- Lexington, Kentucky
- Wapakoneta, Ohio and London, Ontario, Canada
- Bloomington, Indiana
And in each place, we have found the beautiful. It’s not the travelling, but the traveller that makes the difference.
The Truth is in the Middle 