Wanderlust

I devoured the book Wanderlust, a Love Affair with Five Continents by Elisabeth Eaves.  It was a bit creepy--that "Did we cross paths?" feeling.  Were we in Yemen at the same time?  Australia?  I, too, settled down at the age of 34, after moving nine times in eleven years.

It did get me thinking about the word "wanderlust".  I bandy it about a lot.  In her Prologue, she explains how "wanderlust" is untouched from the German because it simply could not be improved upon.  For me, it sometimes feels like an incurable disease.  I now have a family, a mortgage and a job, but I work to travel and travel every chance I get, though it might just be a few miles away.  Three-week trips abroad help, but I yearn for the day when I can throw on a backpack again and just go.

Unlike me, her wanderlust seems to be cured by the book's end.

  "You go out into the world a sponge, and everything blows you away--the first palm tree, the first laundry line strung over desert-yellow dust.  Now ,though, I've absorbed too much.  I know that Florence won't have any impact.  Zip.  I know this because nothing does anymore.  Not the Tuileries, not the cathedral at Chartres.  They're admirable and beautiful, but they slide right out of my consciousness, and I start wondering what to have for dinner."

Be forewarned, Elisabeth, it will come back with a vengeance like a super virus.  Truthfully, I hope I never find a cure, and these pictures from Yemen are why!