Bascom Writers’ Group Prompt: Places Wanting to Visit

Longing to Experience

By Deena C. Bouknight

I will never get to all the places I ache to see in person. I hate to look at a National Geographic or other travel publications, because I inevitably read about and see photographs of an obscure place never heard about.  Then I want to add it to my list. I have been as far as Scandinavia and to the lofty 9,700-foot heights known as the Zugspitze on the border of Germany and Austria and in the opposite direction through the Cascades and onto the other-worldly Haiti in the Caribbean.

When I travel, I don’t just want to see – I desire to experience. My dream would be to truly live in a place for a month or more at a time. To snatch a bit of the language, or dialect, to know the people, patronize the shops, revel in the landscape. I was able to do that in Germany a few years ago, walking daily through the wheat fields and to the baker down the Roman-era path, biking along the rivers from village to village and seeing storks nesting on cottage roofs, and picking cherries from branches overhanging a neighbor’s fence.

But I also try to experience a place even if I am only there a short time.

For a few days last week, I was with my brother and sister in law in Louisiana and we not only took a boat ride down a remote swamp-flanked river that was edged with moss-laden cypress trees, but we also visited Natchez, Mississippi – which remains in something of a time-warp – and stayed in an antebellum home lush with fine antiques and walked along and soaked up the vastness that is the great Mississippi River.

I believe the ultimate experience – that may actually cause me to be undone with emotion – is to visit such holy and ancient lands as Turkey and Israel and Egypt. To step on some ground or into a structure where the great pharaohs and the kings and Mary and Joseph and Jesus may have placed their own feet … to touch construction that is perhaps thousands of years old … to dip my foot into the mysterious Jordan River … to eat fish from the sea of Galilee … and to gaze and float upon the Dead Sea.

I have been told I have wanderlust. Perhaps I do, for even though I daily rejoice over the fact that I get to live in this place to which no adjectives do justice, I am scarcely back from one new excursion when I am musing about another.

But as I write this I view a line of sun-streamed mountains as a backdrop to my yard’s colorful trees, and I am content.

We are only visitors here.