"there's no place like home" grrl_travel's Profile

i've traveled around some (all over the US even though the map doesn't show it), and i live in seattle. i haven't filled in the all the pages for places i've been yet -- but i put some info in the seattle & istanbul sections. i love travel more than anything, but i love coming home too.

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<a href="http://www.bigbadcat.com/zola/travel.html" target="new">travel feeds the soul</a>

Travelling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things - air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.
-Cesare Pavese
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One of the biggest surprises about travel for me is that it is possible to find home, small pieces of it, elsewhere. Not everywhere, but there are places. I didn't find home in London, but certainly in the south of France, in a small country bed and breakfast the room was home. The furniture was sparse but solid, the bed was like my grandmother's, the linens were linen, and tucked away in that place, there was no need to be anywhere else in the world. There was something similar in Istanbul. Even in the heat of the summer in a very different world from the one I am used to, after meeting up with friends (and after traveling halfway around the world alone) and sitting on the balcony drinking warm beer and looking out at the Bosphorus, it was home. The feeling extended into even the weirdest parts of that trip. As sappy as it sounds, as long as you are living in the moment, home can travel with you to some extent.