I come to a blank sheet of paper, in this case, my online editing window, and quickly try to find something to write about. Rarely does a day go by that I don’t think, “Hey, I should pen a note to my best friend and wife, telling her and the whole world how much I love her.” Then, without her right here in front of me, whatever distraction crawled into my minuscule attention span guides my brain down other paths and I’m off trying to figure out the cures for society’s problems.

Well, now I’m here and ready to start spilling sappy poetic musings out of my heart, but where does one begin extolling those passions with puny written words? I look to my blog, searching for how many other times I’ve shared this sense of Amore with my wife, and the results show me 430 out of 2,294 published posts having a reference to the word love. I don’t think the post about Crispin Glover qualifies for this list, but the WordPress search isn’t the smartest, and Glover does have the word love in it.

I then wondered: was there a thread that tied these references to love to her? Or was I speaking generally about her, the trees, oceans, and other things? It doesn’t really matter, I figure, as it was part of the subject matter, and I don’t have the time right now to read 430 blog posts of varying lengths to pull the context of a particular word out of them. The next best thing is to look at tags, and very quickly, by those and the titles of these entries, it becomes obvious that I use the word love a lot when we are traveling.

Off the top of the bat, the tag “Coast” appears 51 times, and “Oregon” shows up 37 times. What this tells me is that when Caroline and I are on the coast, we are maybe more aware of our love of one another than at other times. This is only sort of true as we know all the time where our love is and how it pulses through our days. The difference is that when we are traveling, especially in coastal regions, our time together is amplified by the fact that we are out at the edge of the ocean and not preoccupied with history, architecture, food, or other destinations that await us. We are effectively at the totality of what the day will be made of, looking at the sand and sea.

There’s another element at work when we are traveling: we are taking time for ourselves outside the routines of daily life. The time preparing for these travels and saving money for them all starts to make sense as soon as we are underway but really starts to resonate when we start to get close to 100 miles from home because, at that point, we are definitely going somewhere. With no work, chores, or the familiar to pull us into what we know, we turn our awareness on to full observation mode of what is different and what new sights and sounds await us.

The excitement of being with someone else who is enjoying this sense of adventure as much as the other makes everything all the easier. Every minute that passes builds the smiles and anticipation for what awaits us out there. We know that no matter what we find, we’ll discover something about the environment, weather, trees, surf, local eateries, history, street life, churches, museums, odd characters, lodging, or even a table we took a minute to sit down and knit and write at that will enchant us, convincing us that this trip is on track to be the greatest ever.

This comfort with each other is had at home, too. We are doing great being at home during the outbreak of COVID-19 because it’s given us even more opportunities to be together and be outside our routines. So, in many ways, this time is like a vacation, and as we get further down the road of self-isolation, I remain giddy in love that we are traveling into unknown places.