Saturday, February 23, 2013

The Travelers's Anonymous (TA) Support Group

Travel is an addiction which you don't cure, you simply learn to live with.  I've recently found some great moral support from others who are in the same boat.

"When I was young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch.  When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age.  In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am 58 perhaps senility will do the job.  Nothing has worked.  Four blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and my feet to tapping.  The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clapping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage.  In other words, I don't improve; in further words, once a bum, always a bum I fear the disease is incurable." (Italics mine)
     ~John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley.

"Perhaps the balance here, between order and disorder, suits me.  What I find here probably helps me understand my own mind, my own life."
     ~French photographer Frederic Lecloux, on why he keeps coming back to Nepal.

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