travel log
Below is a simple start to some words I penned after returning home from our trip to Central America a few months ago. After spending ten days traveling around Costa Rica with our kids, I can honestly say that our lives have been changed. We were blessed with some incredible experiences, and more importantly, sweet time with friends.
These journal entries of sorts, may be published a bit after being written, as is the case with the words below. I hope these perspectives will serve to inspire you as you recall the people and experiences that have shaped your life and travels!
(Written February 2018)
It’s quiet here, in the cold Pennsylvania suburbs in the middle of February. The occasional beep of a delivery truck sounds in the distance, while the dryer hums in the next room. It is too quiet. It has felt this way since returning from our adventure abroad last month, or perhaps I should say, I have felt this way since our return. That it is all too quiet.
I miss the call of the toucans, the high-pitched yap of the stray dogs, the car horns, and the pumping base speakers. The friendly greetings called out from car windows to passing friends, and the pattering of rain on rooftops and canopy leaves cannot be heard this far away.
I know it’s all continuing on without us there to hear it. I know because we receive videos from friends who still wake to the shrill call of the rooster and ride their bikes to work down dirt roads in the tropics. I also know this because every few years when we hop on a plane and return to the land of red roofs, it is all there waiting for us, welcoming us back with it’s cacophony of familiar sounds.
And if only it were just the sounds, perhaps my heart would not be tethered so strongly, but alas it is also the smells. As I emptied my suitcase a few weeks ago, I took a final deep breath of the damp clothes, desperately needing a wash after their 4,000-mile journey home.
They smelled like life.
Like the fried food in the marketplace, the arroz con pollo in every soda shop, the meat that hung curing in the open market air. Like livestock and tropical flowers, like rain and fields of strawberries.
Like the great Kapok tree, not in the pages of my children’s book, but standing very real and alive, 150 feet over my head, surrounding me like an embrace from an ancient giant.
A cough catches in my throat and I am stirred back to reality. Back to the spacious and comfortable living room, to the couch where my sleeping four year old is curled up to my right, toes touching my thigh. She too, misses this place of my dreams, surprising me with a different answer every time I ask the question, “What do you miss most, my love?”
And my mind and my prayers keep echoing the same thought, “How do I make more of this?” How can I make ten days on foreign soil matter more, linger longer, impact greater than a luxury vacation? How can we allow the things we saw, the sounds, the smells, the dripping ice cream cones and fresh brewed coffee and laughter with friends, stay with us?
And the answer is, I can write.
I can write, I can write, I can write.
Because the things we felt are universal, they pull at the places inside of all of us. They speak to the desire to be seen, to be known, to befriend others. They challenge our motives for loving strangers and speak to the racing pulse of anxiety when we turn down unfamiliar roads. These stories are more then a vacation slideshow because the souvenirs we returned with weren’t bought with foreign currency, they were experienced, taught, observed.
And so I will write, in hopes that my words do justice to the places we have visited and the people we love.