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We hold these truths to be self–evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I just received my new passport. The pages are empty, waiting for adventures to fill them. It is so exciting to me, I don’t yet know what journeys lie ahead. But I trust that there will be journeys. One of my favorite things to do is to travel the world, exploring new places, and revisiting beloved ones. I read once that the travel bug ends when you find your true home, I disagree. I love my home, my family, my life, but I find this world of ours amazing, and would love to see every square inch of it, but I’ll settle with what I can. And I’m okay with that too. It is not travel for the sake of travel. It is travel for the sake of wonder.
I love a stamp in my passport, I love that a book can be marked with a memory, one that is also marked on my heart. My old passport had so many fun adventures, as did the one before that, and the one before that. I was born in England, so from the time I was 5 months old and moved to America, I’ve had a passport. The early ones had a trip a year to England. Okay, they’ve all pretty much had a trip a year to England. But my last one was hard to let go, it had a fabulous Kenya page, they put a sticker on the entire page. A sticker that every time I saw it made me think of elephants and rhinos and giraffes, and all of the wonder that is Kenya. My two amazing trips to Iceland, one for the Northern Lights, when everything was frozen and covered with snow, and we tried maple syrup on a pizza for the first time, and a second in the early summer when we learned that the Lupines there grow as far as the eye can see and create a landscape that is stunning in it’s fragrant purple-ness. Two very different trips to Mexico – one at a dance camp with my mother, and one celebrating Day of the Dead with my sister. It didn’t have stamps from the rest of last summer’s journey which started with the Lupines in Iceland, but then continued to the Romantic Road of Bavaria in Germany, where we had enormous beers, because you pretty much have to! It then continued to Stockholm, Sweden, where we got to see the King and Queen and go to the ABBA museum. What could be better than that?
A passport is a little keeper of memories. I can’t wait to make some.
