Gallivanting...

I have wanderlust.

I have Gypsy blood.

I want to pack up a few precious belongings and hit the road.

I want to live for a year to feel each season in New York City. In Savannah. In Coeur d'Alene. In London. In Edinburgh. Outside Rome. In Jerusalem. My life is too short to live everywhere I want to.

This weekend I went home to PA for my brother's birthday. As I whizzed by at 75 mph on the Ohio Turnpike, I noticed two Amish men working their farm. How do they do it? How do people live their whole lives in one place? How do they work daily beside a highway and never take it wherever it goes? Do they ever have the urge to cross the field and flag down a car and just go to.... to ANYwhere? I haven't traveled much, but I can't for the life of me imagine not having the option... or more accurately, not having the desire for the option.

One of my first nicknames was "Gypsy." Our neighbor and my dad's best friend was Sam. When I was about 4 or 5... back when neighborhoods seemed smaller and safer... he was cutting the grass out front and saw me skipping by. When he went to the backyard, I was traipsing down the alley. When he returned to the front to water plants, I walked by again with a great sense of purpose. Where I was going or what I was doing, no one could tell. He told my folks that they had a real Gypsy on their hands. I have been gallivanting... or wanting to gallivant... ever since.

When I read Huckleberry Finn, I immediately wanted to cut down trees and rope a raft together. From the end of my street you could see the Beaver River. I knew it flowed into the Ohio. I got a map and figured I could float down the Beaver to the Ohio to the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. My mother said it wouldn't work. There were locks on the rivers and they wouldn't let a lashed-log boat through. That didn't stop me from daydreaming about it every day for an entire summer.

When I read Little House on the Prairie, I wanted to cross the country in a Conestoga wagon. A few years later, during our country's Bicentennial celebration, a group of reenactors did exactly that. When they came through our town I nearly ran away... not to join the circus, but a traveling group of covered wagon riders.

My dream came true in 2001 when Tom and I took our RV to Alaska and back. We christened it the Gypsy Chateau (Chateau being the oh-so-fab name of the manufacturer). I was Laura Ingalls Wilder in a modern Conestoga!

God knew what he was doing having me born in this era. I never could have hacked it without my own, private toity.

Showered in His grace,