With apologies to Jane Austen, it’s a truth universally acknowledged that anyone in possession of a good fortune must want to travel. The corollary to that is that travel broadens the mind. In Jane’s age, wealthy young British men went on extensive European tours to acquire the “savoire faire” and that certain “je ne sais quoi” required for their lives as gentlemen, often enjoying experiences that would have been frowned upon at home.
Fortunately today, one’s fortune can be modest and yet still allow worldwide travel, just in varying degrees of comfort. And even more importantly, now women – young and old – can travel as they like and also indulge in encounters formerly only granted to their male counterparts.
While travel broadens the mind for anyone who has control of their eyes, ears, nose, and taste buds, especially for a writer, it can generate ideas that will set the mind wandering into that next piece of flash fiction, short story, or it might even provide the inspiration for a novel.
While traveling, have you ever had an unexpected encounter with a person or a place that left a deep, or even lasting, impression on you? Tell us about it in 500 words.
Tell us about a place you would never visit again. Was it that horrible? Or was it too remote? Why are you saying: never again?
Is there a place on your bucket list that you dream of visiting? Why have you not gone there so far? Or is a journey in the planning stages?
Have you ever visited a place where you thought: I could live here!? Why? What attracted you to it?
It’s April and time to make plans for the rest of this year. Tell us about them.
Photos from personal collection
I have noticed that environment affects me strongly, and that in any new place, my mind, at some deep level, imagines it lives in that place. In soulless places, in ugly places, that can be unsettling. But should I ever visit a place that screams at me how good it would be to live there, it is even more unsettling.
As much as the view, however, the culture affects me deeply, as it would if you imagine you have to live there. Maybe it is for that reason that visiting places with cultures I do not understand has no interest for me.
Happily, I live in a beautiful place, and the restriction on ‘foreign’ cultures mean I would never be interested in the world’s more exotic places. This all contributes to my deep contentment with where and how I live.
So when I visited my step-son on the coast of the Moray Firth, in the far north of Scotland, a couple of years ago, where he’d recently moved, it was a shock to experience that ‘I could live here’ feeling. A peturbance I was not used to. And it won’t quite go away, even though I, even now, frequently check the weather forecasts to see how cold, grey and windy it is there compared to my place in the Pyrenees, and how dark in winter.
What attracts me to the place? I, a mountain-lover, prone to depression in darkness and bad weather, should not be interested. But there is something about the open skies, the open sea, the way the place is not spoilt by humankind. And not a little too about the Scottish heritage, it being in my blood. A timelessness, too, it could be 2026, it could be 1976.
I’ve been back, and the same feeling pervaded.
Maybe to get it out of my system, I need to go back in the middle of winter, and break that romantic view, take off the rose-tinted spectacles!
Thanks for this, Rachel! I understand your feelings about Scotland. And I truly believe it is possible to find many places on this earth where one could live. But of course, it would always be a different life, another iteration of oneself. That opens up so many interesting paths to get lost down when you start thinking about it.