Travel

Over the years, I have come to see that much of my writing is shaped in some fashion by travel. Leaving the security of home to venture up a foreboding mountain peak, pack up and move across the country to a new job, or wade the warm waters of a sunny, tropical island, opened doors to new sights, sounds, people and places.

I come from a family of people who love to travel. My mother and father were nearly itinerant during the 1930’s and my first family road trip, at age 11, we went from Michigan to Texas to Denver to Indiana to the envy of my friends who stayed home. I was never the same after my father put me on the Great Northern from flat Michigan to the magic of Pacific northwest mountains.

Travel, even across town to visit an ailing friend, offers the opportunity to experience the world and people, in a way that can only be achieved by direct, personal contact. And the more I travel, at home crisscrossing the USA or destinations abroad, the more raw material I am able to gather. Material that sits patiently in my journals waiting to be shaped into a story about my late sister in-law, Lynda, in Paris, or a poem waiting to be discovered on Rockaway Beach in Oregon, or seeing the great Redwoods with my daughter, Susan. .

In the days, weeks, months, and hopefully the years ahead, my goal is to share more writings based on my travels…be it around the corner or around the world. Bill