White sand beach, blue sky, palm trees, thick novel, suntan lotion, me. That about covers it, the real-life version of the glossy travel brochure. The only thing missing was the big, happy-go-lucky Hollywood grin on the lounging sun bather. It wasn’t there, it was more of a scowl.
I had remembered that travel was not a place you needed to fly to or show a passport to get into, that it’s not a spot on a map, that it’s not far away, but it can be hard to get to, hard to find, that there aren’t maps or guidebooks, that travel is a state of mind, a state of being, and that I had found it again.