Home-based exhilaration

I love to travel. I love the memories, and whenever I travel, I figure the money spent is one of the best investments of life. Yes, it's expensive at the time, but traveling is truly the gift that keeps on giving until the day we die.

I cannot remember a trip I've ever taken that has failed to provide me vivid images and recollections that I can tap at a moment's notice. Some of those trips go back more than 50 years.

All the Sunday drives to Montana, sitting on the hump in the back seat between two brothers, the occasional hand-outs from the box of bacon thins held by the front-seat guard---and the outdoor potty stops in the wet grass---those were great times. Well, at least they seem to be now as I think back on them.

Though I can't remember one distinct Sunday adventure over another, except maybe the day my sister thought she saw a green bear or the day my 9-months pregnant mother screamed at my dad cuz he had driven up some power-line path with no clear turnaround. Those stand out, but the trips are tucked away in their own compartment of my library of recollections.

Mother, Mike, Kevin and I took our first road trip in 1958 in a brand-new Ford ranch wagon. On that journey we amassed a vast storehouse of memories---good and bad. The 103-degree temperatures across North Dakota in the age before air conditioned cars about did us in. Trying to sleep in the car at some roadside wide spot during a wild Michigan thunder and lightning storm was a challenge.

We chose those accommodations because we did not want to miss crossing the newly constructed Mackinac Bridge (touted then as a wonder of the world) in the daylight. It was a scary night and a sleepless one too, but the trip across that fabulous engineering marvel (designed by a University of Idaho engineer, by the way) was worth all the aches and fatigue we suffered from trying to sleep in unusual, uncomfortable situations.

I could fill a book with trip memories. Maybe I should.

For now, that's not my object. My object is to say I love trips, but I also love coming home. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, I long to go home once the reason I've left home has played out.

Our Chicago trip provided all of us a whole new drawer of images and memorable moments to savor briefly and then tuck away, like a fine wine, to age and to grow more dear as the years roll by. Our group, representing three generations of family, will each view the trip in a different way, and that's what makes the investment all the more rich.

We also feel blessed to have spent some lovely moments with a lot of folks we'd never met who will now remain on our list of "must see these people again." I've invited the whole crowd to come to North Idaho and to hang out at the Lovestead. If they all come at once, that would be interesting, but I do hope they come.

For now, I'm thrilled to be back home with my dogs, cats, horses, flowers and veggies. I've walked the yard this morning and discovered fruit trees blossoming for the first time this year, and I look forward the watching the fruits develop as the spring and summer wind on.

We've just left a setting where a lot of new relationships have blossomed and the chance of their bearing fruit in future years is just as exhilarating to me as coming home, nurturing my surroundings while thinking about where I've just been and how my life has changed because of it.

Yup, I don't think we lose a dime with travel, no matter how expensive it tends to be, and when we come home, we're that much more appreciative of the sanctuary where we can plant the dreams of yet other future adventures.

Not a bad deal, if you ask me.