Why postcards from the road not taken?

For the last seven years, I’ve been very fortunate to have traveled to some amazing places–both on work assignments and on vacation. From Amsterdam to Valetta, Anchorage to Kotor, Athens to Verona, Agrigento to Ephesus, and Agra to Edinburgh, I’ve often shared photos on Facebook with a bit of history or some interesting perspective. Friends have said “You should write a travel blog” so many times I lost count.

Which brings us to “Postcards from the Road Not Taken.” In many ways, like Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken,” I’ve often faced difficult choices in life and each time, I too was sorry I could not travel both roads and be one traveler. In looking back, I usually chose the road less traveled by. Yet I always wondered about the road not taken, the one I had kept for another day. I suspect many people reading this blog have at one time or another, thought someday we’ll go to Paris, someday we’ll make the trip to see the cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C., someday I’ll go to Bali.

After I survived heartbreaking losses and setbacks in 2010-2011, I decided it was time to explore the roads I had not taken in my 20s, 30s, and 40s.

Travel touches us in ways often difficult to explain. There are no words to describe the emotions I felt standing on the stern of a cruise ship gazing at Mount Vesuvius hovering above the harbor of Naples, gilded by the late summer sunset, until it faded away in the distance, a violet shadow on the horizon. The same view my grandmother would have seen more than one-hundred years earlier as a fifteen-year-old girl sailing to America on the steamship SS Weimar. She would never return to Italy; yet in the last six years, I’ve been there eight times. Each time the language and the food transporting me to my grandmother’s kitchen in the 1960s — a place that now exists only in memories, some still vivid and full of color while others grow hazier with each passing decade.

If we let it, travel makes our world smaller and our hearts fuller by showing us how we are all not so different in our shared hopes and fears on our beautiful planet.

I hope you will enjoy the journey with me as I stake a claim to special places and special memories. Perhaps they will inspire you to explore your own roads not taken.

Lisa Scattaregia