This Past Month...

​I have to say, so far this year; the month of June has probably been my busiest yet.  Between work and travel I didn’t have an empty day on the calendar.  I whitewater rafted in Pennsylvania, hiked in Red River Gorge Kentucky, backpacked along the western coast of Michigan, and flew “across the pond” for an amazing couple of days in London and Paris.  It was an awesome and exhausting months’ worth of travels that reinvigorated me when I got home, settled some of my long lasting urges and at the same time, created all new ones.
​​
The month began with a rafting trip to Pennsylvania with some old friends and a few new ones as well… I spent a day rafting Class V rapids on the Upper Youghiogheny River with some folks I had never met and then spent the next day running self-guided Class III+ rapids with my group of friends where we all found ourselves in the water at some point or another.  It was a wild weekend and made me thirsty for some more time on a river somewhere, whitewater or not.

---

After that I spent some time in Red River Gorge, backpacking and hiking around with the doggo, enjoying a place that I’ve come to know extremely well.  There’s never a dull moment in The Gorge and I always want to go back and find my next adventure there.
In the middle of the month I flew to London to visit one of my best friends.  We saw the city, enjoyed a slightly different culture than ours and had a great time along the way.  I hiked the White Cliffs of Dover and enjoyed train rides around the English country side.  We conquered Paris over the course of a day, climbing to the tallest points in the city, eating delicious food and having quite the journey along the way.  I walked around in Iceland (even if only on the airport tarmac) and got inspired for future adventures.

---

I rounded out the month with a trip that had been in the works for a while now, a visit back up to Nordhouse Dunes Wilderness, situated on the western shore of the Lower Michigan Peninsula.  After discovering it back in October, its become one of my favorite places in the Mid-West. We laid in the sand, played in the water, had a great time around a campfire and I made some awesome new friends.  It was both a relaxing and tiring weekend; different from the first time I had been there back in October but still rewarding none the less.

---

---

All my rampant traveling in June got me thinking about what I want my life to be like in the coming years.  I’m sure no matter what it will be filled with traveling, but what will that traveling look like?  Will it be these little micro-trips that I’ve been doing?  Will I start traveling abroad more?  Am I going to spend more time in cities than in the wild places I’ve come to love? Odds are slim on that one…  Will I start traveling solo because the people that I used to find myself adventuring with will all get too busy with their own lives?  I realized I had no idea what the answers to most of these questions were and that the style and types of my future travels is far from being clear.
​
I think I have a unique situation where I never feel stressed or overly tired from my life or my travels.  Often the only way I make it through a day at work is by thinking back on the last journey I had and using it as inspiration to work towards the next.  I also find that when others say they are too busy for a trip, I will always find a way to make it work because we make time for what we love and what makes us happy.

My future is undoubtedly filled with traveling.  Will it be as much as I did this past month, I have no idea…  Will it be frequent and to far flung, unknown places, I’m sure of it… Will it be full of the same people I’ve come to thoroughly enjoy traveling with, I have no idea…  The reality is that people grow older, get busy and change what they are doing.  One thing I do know is that I will continue to journey the world wherever and whenever I can, I will always try to drag those around me along for the ride and I will surely reach out to friends old and new as our paths cross in our lives and in our travels.

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