On Travel

My favorite blog has taken up the side topic of traveling, in a philosophical and international sense, here are a few quotes that really caught my eye. It fits in with the mission of this blog, which is the striving to truly know your immediate surroundings.

The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home.-Emerson

The human bond that he feels at home is not an illusion. On the contrary, it is rather an inner reality. Man is inside all men. In a real sense any man may be inside any men. But to travel is to leave the inside and draw dangerously near the outside.- Chesterson

At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.- Emerson

The proper conservative resistance to travel is not, therefore, a blinkered resistance to the new; it is an understanding that we have never fully absorbed or understood what we already know; that the places we love are still mysterious, and understanding of them should never be mistaken for simple familiarity. Seeking new superficialities at the expense of familiar depths is a neurosis, not an adventure.-Andrew Sullivan, on tourism.

A Brief Overview

The picture above is of Roger and Woz, the newly married couple that Sean and I became very close with in a short period of time. Sigh. They are are Ithaca, NY bound as I write this.
A cool piece of art work at the new waffle place in town, Off the Waffle. These guys are amazing. Took Sean on his word that he would pay them, gave us two Banana infused waffles with chocolate chips. Yyyyuuummm!
You can tell by the look on Sean's face that he is tired, way too optimistic, and weary of my constant photo snapping. We were lost on Mt. Pisgah for 5 hours, luckily we found our way back to our car right before dark.
Two Fridays ago Sean's friends were in town for the Eugene Marathon. We were all walking home from The Vintage and around 7:45pm we looked to our right and saw a big gathering of drunken carolers around a bonfire in an apartment complex on 10th and Lincoln. It was like a tractor beam, I was pulled towards the chaos. In this picture, "Hash Mother" and the ringleader of all events with the bedpan.

Sean laying out in front of the new Cornucopia.

View from a log looking down river near McCredie Hot Springs.

An awesome log tee-pee built by the Willamette on the West Bank Tral.

Mountains.

Shortly after Sean and I found out that he had not been accepted to University of Indiana, we took a walk on Mt. Pisgah. Our inevitable separation seemed cemented with his little letter from Indiana. As we walked, and meandered through Mt. Pisgah's open meadows, dark forests, and labored it's steep inclines I realized we were working through our internal struggle with every step.

Sean was divided and spent on what to do with his life. I was as well, but feeling an ego boost from my recent acceptance letter. We made it up to the top that day. We took a skinny side trail down, leaving us wandering for hours---working through our immediate frustration as well. The importance of Mountains.