dharmabum222's VirtualTourist Home Page

While posting the photograph above from my recent trip to Glacier National Park, something suddenly occurred to me. I have been organizing so many of my recent trips around being near mountains without realizing that I was doing it. The most recent affliction seems to have started with California's Yosemite National Park just shy of 2 years ago, went on to the Argentine side of the Andes Mountains last summer, climbing cliffs in Maine's Acadia National Park and then most recently "The Rockies" in Montana & Canada's Glacier, Kootenay, Waterton and Banff National Parks.

Living on an island had perhaps taken it's toll on me, not sure. Just as swiftly and under the radar as this fixation arrived, it left. With no ceremony or reasoning, I find myself drawn now to more arid landscapes. I am craving cultural experiences more than the seclusion of a mountainside.

Montana has left me sated for now while somewhere in the depths of my soul is a whispering voice repeating Himalaya, Himalaya, Himalaya.

That whisper is simply hard to hear over the drums as they beat Africa, Africa, Africa.

Oftentimes on my pages and in travelogues I refer to a collective, often ambiguous "we" and the "we" is different depending on the location but it is always one of 2 people.

Erik is my partner in more than travels and has shown me that you do not need to suffer to feel like you are seeing the world. He recognizes that planning a trip is, for me, part of the trip itself... from the obsessive observation of air fare prices months earlier, waking to me practicing my best "good morning" in Swahili before his alarm has even gone off...or pulling another copy of lonely planet off of my face as I snore. He knows the sheer joy that the planning brings me and he lets me go about it, ever the eager participant.

I think that sometimes part of the adventure for him is the not knowing...I am certain that while he would not admit it, there are times when he packs a bag, full of excitement and has no idea what airport we are landing in.

That is trust...

"We" are the perfect partners in our balance. Now we are getting married so that the travels never end!

Linnea and I usually sleep in tents and carry backpacks. "We" have slept in places infested with scorpions & been eaten nearly to death by other assortments of insects. There have been times when we sweat ourselves to sleep under a dome of stars in the tropics or shivered into restless slumber in the shadow of a glacier.

Together "we" have witnessed the clumsy grace of breaching humpbacks in the rain, danced on an world bathed in 24 hour daylight and raged to the beat of the earth's pulse as the sun rose over Rio.

All the while living for the adventure and the overcoming of it all and laughing until we cry.

She makes me remember that I have an adventurous side that gets lost sometimes.