Travel is So Broadening...Part I

“To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is 

to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, 

to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.” –

 Bill Bryson

It's good to get away. I mean really away. Away from phones and email; away from laundry and grass cutting; away from television, radio, the mail, the bank, the bills.

It takes a while to really get away. You can fly 3000 miles from home, but it takes the accumulation of seconds and minutes and hours to knock all those attention grabbers out from the front of your brain. 

This September we flew to Manchester, England to visit the Yorkshire Dales. We've been there many times. I can't seem to get enough. Am I just an unadventurous traveler afraid of a foreign language, or is there something that draws me back there over and over?

 I've been thinking about what lures me back to Swaledale 
time after time.....

or maybe I am just a reincarnated ewe with a pretty good biological memory.

It's not enough to just turn all that regular stuff off. The deprivation is almost painful, and certainly distracting in itself. What I need is scenery that wipes all the dusty corners of my brain clean.  The views there are warm, lush, green, inviting, stark, wild, primitive, huge, ancient. This land is bigger than everything I know. It takes hold and pulls all the insignificant clutter out my life, and 

leaves me fresh, raw, and hypersensitive.

 
Here it is all about light, color, shape and substance. Wind, sun, and rain add to the sensuality of the experience. Suddenly, we are quiet, full, almost exploding. So much to take in and nowhere for our shuttered brains to put it. But staying in that landscape, walking, driving, staring out the window slowly opens it all up-like a shot of  inhaler for asthma- constricted lungs.
The longer I can be there, the more I see, the easier I breathe, the more in touch I feel. That touch is, of course, with the natural world around me. 

But it carries over to the touch of my husband's hand on my back, or a first frothy sip of an English cask ale on my upper lip, the lilt and plod of a Dales accent in my ears while eavesdropping on tall tales at the pub, 

and the crisp delicate flesh of a fresh caught haddock and chips on my tongue. 

Even mushy peas can taste good at times like these.  

The aim is always to see and do, 

to rest and relax, to let go.

But it is not a given. It is that opening up that is the "away", 
and makes the rest of the reward of travel possible.