The Essence of Traveling

Being an English major, I’ve always loved quotes so I found a few that I thought captured what it means to travel here in Europe:

"The perfect journey is circular – the joy of departure and the joy of return." – Dino Basili (I’ve found, as many students do, that I have a renewed love for our beautiful home-away-from-home each time I return to Gaming.)

"Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time." – Steven Wright
(This one is especially true for us poor college students who are too cheap to buy a bus or metro ticket!)

"Traveling is like falling in love; the world is made new." – Jan Myrdal
(How true and how wonderful! Traveling, for me, is all about falling in love – with a place, with its people, and its language, and all the fascinating strangeness that sets it apart…all this newness sort of stretches your mind, opening ideas and horizons you never imagined before.)

"For travel to be delightful, one must have a good place to leave and return to." –Frederick B. Wilcox
(I have discovered from talking to other students that, as incredible as every moment is here, there are times when we all miss home. There is a lot of goodness to be missed and many good people that we are excited to return to at the end of our stay in Gaming.)

"Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not." – Ralph Waldo Emerson
(On the train to Budapest we met some American college students studying in Munich who told us stories of their travels so far, or rather – told us many variations of the same story, which basically involved them getting drunk in every city they had visited and occasionally getting kicked out of hostels. Not once did they mention a historical site or cultural experience or any of the amazing buildings and castles and churches in the cities they had visited and I had to wonder why they even bothered coming over here. We are blessed with a Faith that teaches us to see the world in a sacramental way and this is the beauty we carry with us as we travel across Europe.)

Blog posted written by Cara Weiss, Gaming Fall 2009