Glad to be encouraged

 A writing teacher and author whom I follow wrote a thoughtful piece on her Substack feed that I just read.  https://open.substack.com/pub/pattidigh/p/reclaiming-the-ability-to-people?r=2800f6&utm_medium=ios

It was a remarkable essay about how we can emerge into the world again.

That’s been my journey moving back towards connection and international travel.

My comment on her piece found me reflecting about my own experience.  So grateful to have that nudge to get back out there.

This is what I wrote:

“Thank you for this thoughtful piece, Patti.  I’ve experienced so many of those feelings and emotions emerging from the pandemic. First back in Asheville this fall after time largely in nature in Quebec.  And now traveling to Austria for three weeks has thrown me into airplane travel and mass transit.  

Scary. We’re totally vaccinated. It’s time to travel again, as my husband became a dual-citizen of Austria a couple of years ago, due to reparations, it’s our first international travel destination aside from Canada (where we have a cottage in a rural spot near a larger city).

So, it’s remarkable how being in Vienna for a week in a HomeExchange apartment, getting into the Altstadt via U-Bahn and tram, visiting crowded museums, drinking coffee in cafes in close quarters, etc. has revitalized my experience of traveling well.   I initially wore a mask in the airports, briefly on the U-Bahn, then have just returned to traveling mode (we’re long-tine independent travelers).

We’re off tomorrow on the train to Salzburg for another HomeExchange week. We’re privileged indeed to be able to travel now.  And I’m grateful that the pilgrimage of return to Austria got both of us on that plane.”

So, I’m not sure if we didn’t have the tug of completing the circle to return to Austria, that we would have traveled abroad again.  I think we’ll come back as family history ties are strong.  My husband’s grandparents and his father and uncle fled Vienna in 1939, getting on a last boat from Amsterdam to the United States.  Their destination was Los Angeles, where they had a sponsor.

We visited his great-grandfather’s grave in the Zentralfriehof. thanks from location sleuthing by our niece, who lives in London with her husband.