Coming Home

I arrived home last night after two weeks in Scotland.  Nine of those days were spent hiking.  Getting to Scotland, coming home—tiresome and tedious.  Being there—beautiful and wonderful.

A few posts down I quoted Pico Iyer saying, 

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate….And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again — to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. 

He also says, 

[F]or me the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle. 

If I could write like Pico Iyer, I might be truly able to describe what this trip meant.  Scotland is not a country with a different language—not too different anyway.  The culture is much the same as here.  But the landscape is so much more dramatic than Indiana.  I would round a corner or step up higher on the trail and enter a scene that would stop me in my tracks.  Now, back home again, this world seems new and fresh.  Wonderful trip; good to be home.