Today, I am enjoying a cup of Moroccan mint tea in an Egyptian cafe in Cary, NC. The tea is black, medium strength and steeped with fresh mint leaves. It is presented in a small glass cup with a side of sugar.

What an exotic and fortifying drink on a chilly December day!

Born on a farm in rural Kentucky sixty-five years ago, who would have dreamed I would travel to twenty-some nations so far? I vividly remember when my fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Sprowles, pulled down the giant world map attached to the chalkboard. Something ignited inside me. As I surveyed the vastness before me, my nine-year-old heart whispered a desire, “I want to see it ALL!”

The work I am privileged to do through Firefall International requires lots of travel, lots of jetlag. For me it is an honor to go, to taste the food of other cultures, to inquire, listen and learn what life is like on someone else’s turf. I have experienced kindness, generosity, laughter and openness in every place I have traveled. Some rudeness, too, of course, but that is minuscule compared to the delights of travel and the treasures you carry home inside your heart.

I stumbled across these travel quotes a few months ago. Each one touched me in the part of my soul that is ever awaiting the next adventure.

As you read them, I hope you will be stirred to consider stepping outside your sphere of comfort to contemplate a new journey, or perhaps simply pause with a cuppa to remember the joys of a previous trip you’ve made. 

The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page. -St. Augustine

Travel is the only thing you buy that makes you richer. -Anonymous

People don’t take trips, trips take people. -John Steinbeck

A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions. -Oliver Wendell Holmes

One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things. -Henry Miller

Oh the places you’ll go. -Dr. Seuss

Better to see something once than to hear about it a thousand times. -Asian proverb

Traveling - it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller. -Ibn Battuta

I am not the same, having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world. -Mary Anne Radmacher

Cheers,

Nancy