Thanks ...

This entry completes a full year of daily wanderlust posts ... and now I think it's time to take a break, at least for a while. Thanks for reading.

Apgar, Montana ...

June 2010. Favorite place ...

Quote: John Steinbeck ...

"The next passage in my journey is a love affair. I am in love with Montana. For other states I have admiration, respect, recognition, even some affection, with with Montana it is love, and it's difficult to analyze love when you're in it. . . . It seems to me that Montana is a great splash of grandeur. The scale is huge but not overpowering. The land is rich with grass and color, and the mountains are the kind I would create if mountains were ever put on my agenda. Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans. . . . But I see that as usual, love is inarticulate. Montana has a spell on me. It is grandeur and warmth. If Montana had a seacoast, or I could live away from the sea, I would instantly move there and petition for admission. Of all the states it is my favorite and my love."

-- from Travels with Charley: In Search of America, 1962

Lake McDonald, Montana ...

November 2008. Glacier sunset ...

Quote: Charles Tennyson Turner ...

"When the whistle blew and the call stretched thin across the night, one had to believe that any journey could be sweet to the soul."

-- attributed

Ferney, South Dakota ...

August 2005. Handsome car ...

Quote: Jack Kerouac ...

"I didn't know who I was -- I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost."

-- from On the Road, 1957

Currie, Nevada ...

September, 2007. Waiting for a train ...

Quote: Jean-Jacques Rousseau ...

"Walking has something that animates and enlivens my ideas: I almost cannot think when I stay in place; my body must be in motion to set my mind in motion."

-- from The Confessions of J. J. Rosseau, Book 4, 1782

Cape Town, South Africa ...

May, 2006. Evening haze ...

Quote: John Warren Harper ...

He never took a vacation, and at sixty they read his will.
His day for "retiring from business"
Death wrote in a codicil;
And pinn'd on the door of his office
Was a note which grimly read,
"Out of town -- on a long vacation
     Indefinite" it said.

-- from "He Never Took a Vacation," in An Old Fly Book and Other Stuff, 1912

Flores, Guatemala ...

November 2004. The waiting boat ...

Quote: Sheikh Sa'di ...

The advantages of travel are many, such as recreation of the mind entailing profit; seeing of wonderful, and hearing of strange things; recreation in cities, associating with friends, acquisition of dignity, rank, property, the power of discriminating among acquaintances, and gaining experience of the world, as the travelers in the Tariqat have said: "As long as thou walkest about the shop of the house, thou wilt never become a man, O raw fellow! Go and travel in the world, before that day when thou goest from the world."

-- from Tales from the Gulistân or Rose-Garden of the Sheikh Sa'di of Shirâz, 1258

Box Elder Park, Colorado ...

June 1994. Down the Yampa ...

Quote: William Shakespeare ...

"A traveler! By my faith, you have great reason to be sad. I fear you have sold your own lands to see other men's. Then to have seen much and to have nothing is to have rich eyes and poor hands."

-- from As You Like It, c. 1599

Memphis, Tennessee ...

June 2006. Southbound train ...

Quote: Ralph Waldo Emerson ...

"Everything good is on the highway."

-- from "Experience," in Essays, Second Series, 1844

Buenos Aires, Argentina ...

April 2004. City towers ...

Quote: G. K. Chesterton ...

"An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered."

-- from "On Running After One's Hat," in All Things Considered, 1908

Fort Macleod, Alberta ...

October 2006. The American Hotel ...

Quote: Samuel Taylor Coleridge ...

Keep moving! Steam, or Gas, or Stage,
Hold, cabin, steerage, hencoop's cage --
Tour, Journey, Voyage, Lounge, Ride, Walk,
Skim, Sketch, Excursion, Travel-Talk --
For move you must! 'Tis now the rage,
The law and fashion of the Age.

-- from "The Delinquent Travellers," 1824

Las Vegas, New Mexico ...

September 2008. Much nicer than Las Vegas, Nevada ...

Quote: Ambrose Bierce ...

ROAD, n. A strip of land along which one may pass from where it is too tiresome to be to where it is futile to go.

-- from The Devil's Dictionary, 1911

Rome, Italy ...

March 2007. The Trevi ...

Quote: Nancy Mitford ...

"Abroad is utterly bloody."

-- from Love in a Cold Climate, 1949

Slieve League, Ireland ...

March, 2004. Highest cliffs ...

Quote: Henry David Thoreau ...

"It is not worthwhile to go around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar."

-- from Walden, 1854

Honolulu, Hawaii ...

June 2008. The Arizona ...

Quote: Elizabeth Drew ...

“Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.”

-- from The Literature of Gossip, 1964

New Orleans, Louisiana ...

November 2008. Bywater warehouse ...