Many years ago, in one of my precious incarnations, I was the marketing director for a large enclosed shopping mall that had a 10-plex theater attached to it. Although they screened the Rocky Horror Picture Show every Friday night, somehow I never managed to drag my butt into the theater at midnight to watch this campy horror flick. Yes, I was a Rocky Horror virgin!

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Bob Dylan’s song, Blowin’ In The Wind, asked the question

How many times must a man look up before he can see the sky?

I have looked up and seen the sky in its million different moods. I have seen it without a wisp of a cloud to mar its pure cerulean blue. I have watched puffy white cumulus clouds billow up over the horizon where the sea meets the sky. From a sheltering doorway I have waited out gray skies that poured rain down on Bangkok, revealing a sparkling new city as the deluge swept litter and grime from the dirty sidewalks into the storm sewers. There is such beauty in the sky, and I never really noticed it before. I was so caught up in life – or what I thought was life – that I never took time to look at the sky. It wasn’t until I decided to pursue what brought me joy that I began to notice all the beauty in this world.

There is risk in what I have done. I walked away from a very successful, albeit unfulfilling career. I moved to Florida despite the fact that my house in North Carolina has not yet sold. I am unemployed, with large mortgages to pay each month, no income, and a declining Read the rest of this entry »

Willie Nelson said it best with his famous lyrics:

On the road again, Goin’ places that I’ve never been, Seein’ things that I may never see again, And I can’t wait to get on the road again.

That’s me – I just LOVE being on the road. Even when I’m driving between places I’ve been before I try to take a new route. So when it was time to leave Illinois and return to the Outer Banks I studied the map, looking for virgin territory. I’m just barely exaggerating when I say you can’t get there from here – there is no easy way to drive from Illinois to North Carolina. With the help of Google Maps I found a new route that took me through Indianapolis, around Dayton, Ohio, and southeast on US Rt.35 into West Virginia.

Lowe Hotel, Point Pleasant, West Virginia

Lobby of Lowe Hotel

Nicely furnished room

Just over the Ohio border I pulled into the little town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia. It was around 10 PM so I couldn’t really see much, but it was obvious that the three block long downtown was lined with adorably restored older buildings that had been converted to cute shops. In the very middle of Main Street stood the Lowe Hotel – the only hotel in town. Read the rest of this entry »

Were it not for the fact that my family lives in Illinois I would never go there. I believe that every person, place and thing has a unique frequency. As we interact with other people, places and things these frequencies come into contact with each other. Sometimes they resonate with one another and other times they are completely out-of-sync. In my case, my frequency is completely out-of-sync with the entire State of Illinois. The moment I enter Illinois my energy starts to ebb. I become more sedentary. I gain weight. It’s as if a heavy, dark blanket has been thrown over my head. This is always such a gradual process that I’m usually not aware it’s happening – at least not until I leave the State, and then I tend to immediately forget it ever happened. This time was no different. I knew I wasn’t feeling one hundred percent when I hit the road this morning but I had no idea what was wrong until I crossed the State line into Indiana. Within a few miles my head and neck stopped hurting and I felt as if a heavy weight had been lifted from my shoulders.

Purple wildflowers in rural Illinois

If this was an occasional occurrence I would credit it to coincidence but it happens to me every single time I visit. It’s a shame, really, because Illinois has its own special beauty: mile after mile of verdant farmland; country roads lined with spectacular wildflowers, like these purple daisies I discovered on a walk one day last week; clean rivers that attract boaters and fishermen; birds and wildlife; virgin prairies that Read the rest of this entry »

I am sitting at the airport in Lisbon, Portugal, waiting to board my plane. This trip has been a wonderful adventure for me over the past six months. I don’t know why I was so driven to do it; I only know that it was extremely important for me. Perhaps I was feeling my mortality and wanted to make this trip while I thought I still was capable of doing so. Perhaps I just needed to go look for my true path in life. I can’t say that I’ve found my path along the way – yet. But I feel I am close.

I’m embarrassed to admit that I never made it back into Lisbon, nor did I get to the UNESCO World Heritage town of Sintra, just 30 minutes from where I was staying. Frankly, I needed a rest, so I gave myself permission to just lie on the beach for nine days instead of playing tourist right up to the last possible moment and wearing myself to a frazzle. I did, however, have an amazing experience in Portugal. Several days ago Read the rest of this entry »

It may be unfair of me to pick three words that define all of Portugal, since I only visited a tiny part of the northern coast, so I’ll say that the following three words define the coastal resort areas of Portugal:

Sunny: Practically perfect weather, mid-eighties during the day with gentle breezes and in the 70′s at night. Sleeping with the doors and windows flung open. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve got packing down to an exact science. For this six month trip I carried only a small backpack and a carry-on size (22″) rolling suitcase. So I had to choose every article with great care. One of the most difficult decisions when traveling light is what shoes to pack, simply because they take up so much room. I opted for two pair – one a really good (and really expensive) pair of Mephisto sandals that can even be worn into the water as well as my good old reliable tennis shoes. And when I say old, I mean really decrepit. These tennis shoes have seen better days – the laces are frayed and the soles were already cracked when I started this trip. With the amount of walking I’ve been doing, well, you can just imagine the condition they were in. But the plain and simple fact is that they are comfortable. They are well broken-in. They fit my feet like they were molded around them. For all those reasons I have been fighting the idea of new shoes but when I got to Pisa, Italy a week ago and it started to rain, I discovered that the seams between the soles and the upper fabric had come unglued and by the end of the day, my feet were soaking wet.

Still, I figured they would last to the end of this trip. And they would have, if not for the SMELL that erupted from them after they got thoroughly soaked, inside and out.

Dos Condes De Castro Guimares Museum and Library

At first I figured it was more the socks than the shoes, so I washed all my socks and continued to wear the shoes. By the time I got to Portugal I could smell them when they were on my feet. I was certain that people standing near me were wrinkling up their noses in disgust and looking around, trying to identify Read the rest of this entry »

My incredible luck has not failed me as I near the end of my six month around-the-world journey. For my last ten days I have chosen Portugal because I have long wanted to come here, and Cascais specifically for its beaches. Somehow, I just knew I would be tired at this point and badly in need of a rest. And I was. Any one of a hundred beach destinations around Portugal would have provided me with the rest I needed before plunging headlong back into life in the States, but in Cascais I was fortunate to locate a family that has a studio apartment attached to their home, which they gladly rented to me, even though the family was out-of-town when I was scheduled to arrive, had never met me, and knew next to nothing about me. On the evening of my arrival, a family friend met me at the house, handed me a key, gave me a brief tour, and told me to make myself welcome.

Houses and cobblestone streets of Cascais

I slept until 10 AM the next morning (a luxury I have not allowed myself on this trip very often because there was always so much to see and do that I didn’t want to waste even ten minutes of daylight) and woke to delicious sunlight streaming into the courtyard between the main house and my apartment. I jumped into a bathing suit, shorts, and a top and headed out to explore. The street in front of the house leading down to the town square and beach was paved in chunks of white marble about three inches square, flat on top and rough on the sides, each piece laboriously hand-placed and butted up against its neighbor to create a relatively flat road surface. Thousands of cars and pedestrians over the years have polished Read the rest of this entry »

I arrived in Portugal following a nightmare 13 hour travel day where everything that could go wrong did go wrong, including nearly being throw off an Italian train over a seat assignment, a flight that was an hour late, and getting lost at night between the airport and the rail station in Lisbon because the woman at the information desk at the airport told me to take the wrong bus. But hey, my luggage made it though; gotta be grateful for the little things.

Anyway, I took a day and a half to regroup – get money from the ATM, get my laundry done (really, I was beginning to smell), shop for groceries (I am renting a studio apartment in Cascais, a suburb of Lisbon with a series of great little beaches), and write, write, write. I didn’t even go out to see Cascais the first day because I had to get the Cinque Terre, Italy stories out of my head before I saw a new place. So now I’m all caught up and have even uploaded all my Italy photos to the photo library. I hope you’ll want to look at them because I think they are incredible (especially the Venice and Cinque Terre photos). Just click on the above button labeled “Photos” and follow the directions on the resulting page.

My trip is winding down now – only 9 more days. I am sad (I really think I could stay on the road pretty much full time) but I’m also looking forward to getting home to the good old USA where everything is so familiar. There were times during this trip that were very stressful – never knowing what I was going to find from day to day, or even where I was going to be the next day was a constant challenge. In the beginning, I was often “mired in the muck” and had to MAKE myself Read the rest of this entry »