Travelling and Wish Lists

     It's a very trivial side effect of the stay at home orders, but one thing I will miss is the idea of free range travel at least for the near future. Readers know that I love planning and going on trips, despite our limited travel funds, my whole family has had opportunities I would have never dreamed of as a child. I love seeing life in other parts of my country, other places in the world. I pretty much have only done so as a tourist, which to my discredit, is not really seeing the other parts of my country and the other places in the world. Someday though, I want to be able to spend weeks in a location, really feeling part of the community, if that is possible. I don't want it to be a snow bird community though. I know my in-laws loved their retirement community, with two pools, only one of which guests could use, pickle ball courts, and golf carts to tool around the neighborhood the 12 years they wintered in Arizona. That is not us, or at least not me. I want to be near families, and see kids on their way to school, and people doing their every day and Saturday errands. I want the pubs where the locals go, and even if I am only a visitor, the servers get to know my drink of choice!

     It was lovely visiting my daughter when she was a student outside of London. Yes, we did all the touristy things, but we also had a least part of a day where we went to the grocery store with her, saw her campus where she was taking classes, and ate at one of the restaurants she and friends liked, but rarely went to because of student budgets. While she was in class, we wandered her town center, found a book store, a coffee shop, and just planted ourselves for a bit, off the tourist path.

     We loved our stay in a beautiful apartment in the 16th arondissement in Paris instead of a hotel. We walked to Monoprix for provisions, including delicious wine at mind blowing low process, and dropped by the boulangerie for morning baguettes and croissants. Sometimes our timing worked out that the produce man was selling at the top of the stairs leading to the Passe stop. We loved eating at both a pizza place and a corner pub (if that what they are called in Paris) that seemed to have more locals than tourists. I have two simple memories of the trip that stick out. One was my family gathered around the kitchen counter with wine and juice, cheese, bread and fruit, the hot steamy August air and neighborhood sounds coming through the open windows. The other is the five of us enjoying oranges just bought at a small market (where we got scolded because we touched the fruit-I had forgotten the rule), sitting in a park with the shadow of the Eifel Tower looming over us. Where I live, we don't get to buy oranges like that.

     No one is doing traveling now-even travel bloggers and vloggers are rooted at home. The world is feeling smaller again to me, and a bit isolated. In actuality, this health crisis should help us realize that public health is  massive, and changes and escalation spreads fast. Hopefully treatment, cures, and most needed, prevention will spread equally as fast. Once that happens, we can all think about our personal worlds growing again. Until then, dreaming and creating wish lists have no geographic boundaries. I can look ahead over the next 20, maybe 30 years if I can stay reasonably healthy, and think of all the things I want to do in places both near and far. Here's a part of my wish list that I'll be dreaming of. Admittedly, it's all over the place=all over the map.

• Visiting our son in California
• Camping in Yellow Stone
• Seeing the Grand Canyon
• Seeing the Hoover Damn
• Spending a day on a sail boat on the ocean
• Spending some time at a cabin in the Rockies, the Ozarks, the Appalachians
• Staying in a house on one of the Maine Island Communities
• Seeing a Broadway play, with my family, in December in New York followed by or preceded by a visit to Serendipidty
• Joining my girls on a state park and waterfall trip
• Real afternoon tea in London, or anywhere else in the UK
• Hiking Hadrians Wall in Scotland Edit: My mistake as corrected in the comments. It is not in Scotland, but northern England! 
• Staying in a village in Cornwall, like Doc Martins Port Wen
• Visiting our daughter, hopefully, who will still get to study abroad in Spain and a long stretch China; the Spain part is on our list. 
• Living for a few weeks or longer where groceries are all bought in a market-not a grocery store or big box store. I'm thinking some place along the lines of Borough Market in London

     There're places I want to go that I don't even know I want to go there yet! I don't know what the future holds for my kids, but if they are living far from us, I would hope we would be welcome to visit them, though not necessarily stay with them, and be immersed in their lives. It might sound odd, but I enjoyed spending weekends with my daughter in her apartment in Wisconsin, and visiting each of the kids in their college towns. It's the planning and the new that I like. Is travel on your dream list for the post Corona virus world? Is there one particular place you have always wanted to go, or like me, are you all over the map literally with where your mind takes you?