400: Images, Words, Travel

For my 400th blip -- not an official Blipfoto "event," but none the less significant -- I want to feature a book I fell in love with, Le Road Trip. I borrowed it from the library, but having renewed it a couple of times and realizing that I was still reluctant to return the book, I recently bought a copy.

It's the kind of book you can dip into for a page of lovely illustrations or a one-page story and come up refreshed and re-inspired about travel.

For me, Blipfoto is a lot like this lovely book -- words and images, points of view, people all over the world showing glimpses of where they live and where they travel, and how their days, months, and years unfold. Tiny details and vast vistas, everyday life and sacred moments, joys and sorrows -- it's all here.

I was particularly moved by a passage toward the end of Le Road Trip that Vivian Swift, now middle-aged, wrote to her 20-year-old self: You cannot possibly know how much time it takes to learn to treasure this world, how many years it takes to properly cherish your place in it. As you age, you will find it more and more remarkable, a miracle, really, that any of us -- you, me -- are here at all, the result of an undeserved, infinite gift. And the older you get, the more you know how much you will miss all this when you are gone. In the end, the world was not all that changed by your coming, you were not all that crucial to it. But the world, this world, which you will one day travel in homage and gratitude, this world was everything to you.

(I chose today's image with my Blip friend ValC in mind; I hope we can meet in person in the next few years.)