Reading More Than One Page: Faith packs lightly

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

I love to travel.

I love to visit and explore new places.

And at a quick glance, you might not expect that of me. I'm a small town girl whose top three priorities are faith, family and friends. So you're forgiven if you'd expect me to be a bit of a homebody.

Except that I'm not. My fourth priority is education, and one of my favorite ways to learn--about people; about culture; about language and architecture and food--is through travel. For as long as I can remember, my parents and grandparents would load us all up (in a car, on a train, or on a plane) to take us to SEE--to see family or friends, or the locks and dams along the MIGHTY MISSISSIPPI, or the vastness of the ocean, or the myriad of animals at the zoo, or educational sights like the Cahokia Mounds and the Museum of Science and Industry. So for as long as I can remember, travel WAS family and friends and education.

Happily, my faith packs lightly; it's the one priority that never skips a trip due to financial constraint or scheduling conflict. One of the delights of travel is the possibility of finding new holy places. These are not necessarily obviously defined holy places like the Vatican. Instead these are places, some religious and some secular, that leave me feeling at peace, at one with this amazing world that God has shared with us. I've found such places doing mission work, at an amusement park or in a small Italian village.

So that's me. I love to travel.

And because I do, I take pictures, and I talk about all the amazing places I've been. For the past several years, I've shared those pictures and tidbits about my trips on Facebook. Facebook, however, isn't a great place to tell a story (at least not in the wordy, nerdy way of my stories), so I've decided to start this blog. Here I can share the stories behind the pictures--the how and the why and the preferences. Here I can take you along with me as I explore God's green earth (and his desert sand and his red clay and his ocean blue.) Here we can read more than one page of the world book.

Carrie