A bon voyage

I know I promised many posts and lots of pictures of my travels after my return from Europe. I am working on modifying my pictures, and I'll post a link to them when they are finished. As for telling about my trip, I think I'll take my time on that and organize my thoughts a bit more first.

I will say that I enjoyed my trip immensely, especially the time spent with friends. The trip taught me some valuable things about myself, and I surprised myself in some instances with what I accomplished while traveling on my own.

As I left to "Go A Journey," I quoted some from William Hazlitt's essay. I think the following passage that concludes his essay is appropriate now that I have returned.


Dr. Johnson remarked how little foreign travel added to the facilities of conversation in those who had been abroad. In fact, the time we have spent there is both delightful, and in one sense instructive; but it appears to be cut out of our substantial, downright existence, and never to join kindly on to it. We are not the same, but another, and perhaps more enviable individual, all the time we are out of our own country. We are lost to ourselves, as well as our friends. So the poet somewhat quaintly sings,

"Out of my country and myself I go."

Those who wish to forget painful thoughts, do well to absent themselves for a while from the ties and objects that recall them; but we can be said only to fulfil our destiny in the place that gave us birth. I should on this account like well enough to spend the whole of my life in travelling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home!