Some journeys are private…

1 …where we venture out alone, with few provisions.

2 Everything is a surprise, or a delight,or a wonder, or a challenge…

3 to be enjoyed or dealt with on our own.

But sometimes we travel with others. Then there are more decisions to make.

4 How shall we travel? How shall we move from here to there?
Underwater?

5 By helicopter? Or skis?

6 Or the unknown and as-yet unnamed?

7 Perhaps we will take a plane…

8 …to Spain?

9 Or a tiny boat with only room enough for five…

10 …to visit a mountainside where homes crowd atop each other.

11 Perhaps we will sail away in a ship out of the mists of time…

12 …to an island fortress long forgotten?

13 Or take a rickety, rumbling cable car up a hillside…

14 …to discover a medieval village unaffected by modernity?

15 Warmer climes, you say? Then we will travel by camel…

16 …and stay with Bedouins…

17 …perhaps enlisting the help of a local herdsman…

18 …to enjoy the wildlife…

19 …from a safe distance…

20 …for them…

21 and for us.

22 Then maybe you’ll tell me you can fly

23 …and we discover a land forgotten by time.

24 Maybe you’ll prove to have secret talents and we will travel in a small black box…

25 …to visit a large black box.

26 While there, we fall in love with minarets…

27 …and towers…

28 …even discovering that we now notice towers (bell, clock, and otherwise) in Western climes.

29 We are grateful for the new eyes our travels have given us.

30 We can fly to islands…

31 …where animals outnumber people.

32 There, we can ride a horse into the forest…

33 …to discover those who stand out …

34 …and those who hide.

35 Or we can take a canoe…

36 …along the shore…

37 …to see animals at a safe distance,
both large…

38 …and small.

39 Even America has undiscovered lands…

40 …filled with animals who are majestic and rare,

41 or common and equally beautiful.

42

43 Travelling further, we see beauty everywhere we look.

44 Some of it stark…

45 …some of it serene.

46 We decide to take some of the beauty home with us, to decorate our table.

(This was assembled by hand in a 65 x 80 centimeter travel book. I wrote the words on the left side, and glued the stamps to the right. The book was purchased at least 12 years ago as a Christmas gift, yet it never found a home. It stayed in my gift basket all that time. Most of the stamps were given to me by a friend in a massive box from an estate – it was a man’s entire lifetime collection, unsorted, some glued together from damp. I sorted them into categories over a long weekend. That alone took at least 10 hours. Then I sorted out the stamps for this and worked on it over the course of a few weeks. I scanned, cropped, and uploaded this in a day – that took another three hours.)