After I made it past the door man with my iPad in my backpack, I set out to explore my new neighborhood. Eventually I found what I was looking for on Bui Vien street behind my hotel: a backpacker neighborhood. You know you’re in the right place when you see folks...
Thoughts
Things I think on the road.
A different approach to thinking about travel
Everywhere I go in the world, I meet people from the Netherlands (Holland). Tiny country, but those Dutch folks get around. It’s very common for people to do a long-term trip when they’re young, and the travel bug stays with them for life.
Protected: Can a “Manic Pixie Dream Girl of Midlife” Date without destroying people?
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Moods: Choosing Joy
Travel has the power to make you full of energy and wonder — for a few hours, days or even weeks. But then you get habituated to your new lifestyle — and become your everyday self again.
I got your “midlife” right here.
Middle Aged. Mature. Midlife. Menopausal. Matronly. Stodgy words that wear sensible shoes and clutch their pearls. There’s no way to even TALK about being 40 or 50 without first having to get past all the baggage attached to the vocabulary. It’s taken for granted that at this age, we’re...
Motos and Batiks in Yogyakarta
The last couple of days have been weird, wacky and exhilarating — the best kind of travel days.
Plot Twist!
In which Lauren becomes disillusioned with everything and escapes to Java. ~~~~~~~~~~~ The other day I completely dismantled everything about my life in just a few hours. My life is pretty flexible, so this is an easy thing for me to manage — maybe too easy. We’ll see.
Baza, Spain: The Cave House, and Feeding My Soul
Caves are cool, dark and silent. They resonate with earth energy — a sense of being grounded; vibrations as slow and rich as a Tibetan gong. I think that’s why I sleep so deeply in my cave house in southern Spain. Each morning as I reach for my phone...
Nowhere to go but everywhere
A friend reminded me of this quote last night. The whole quote, as Kerouac wrote it, reads “Because he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep rolling under the stars.” This time...
Back on track…Africa, here I come!
After my last post, a really kind ‘internet friend’ wrote to tell me that reading it made him sad. He reminded me that my dream is solid and beautiful, and encouraged me to do whatever I needed to do to keep going forward. This is the response I sent...