There’s a great quotation today on Vagablogging, a travel-themed blog I like to follow:

“Is there anything, apart from a really good chocolate cream pie and receiving a large unexpected check in the mail, to beat finding yourself at large in a foreign city on a fair spring evening, loafing along unfamiliar streets in the long shadows of a lazy sunset, pausing to gaze in shop windows or at some church or lovely square or tranquil stretch of quayside, hesitating at street corners to decide whether that cheerful and homey restaurant you will remember fondly for years is likely to lie down this street or that one? I just love it. I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city.”

 

–Bill Bryson, Neither Here Nor There (1992)

Travel is a major interest of mine, even though I haven’t gotten around to discussing it much here on Simple Tricks, and I’ve got some pretty definite ideas about what constitutes a good travel experience. One of these days I hope to get into some of those thoughts, but in the meantime Bryson has perfectly crystallized many of my favorite travel-related memories into that one paragraph. Those memories are inevitably of moments that occurred as dusk fell, moments when I no longer felt far from home and I realized that I had shed all the worry that dogs me on any ordinary day and was left with only possibility. I’ve been lucky enough to experience that sensation in two European countries and a number of distant American cities. It’s a feeling I don’t feel nearly often enough…