Wanderlust

Bad news.  Thinking about Paris yesterday gave me an intense case of wanderlust.  Ptolemy is always saying, "Go!  Go!"  He wants to go somewhere.  Anywhere!  I feel the same way.  I was reading a book last night that mentioned Shaker Heights, Ohio.  I had an absurd and overwhelming desire to go there and a feeling of intense sadness that I probably never will.  I've been everywhere in Ohio, every city and all over the countryside, it being next door to Indiana as well as on the way from Indiana to the East Coast.  I love Ohio so much that, if I were in the Witness Protection Program, I'd have them relocate me there. 

But seriously?  An overwhelming urge to get in my car and drive to a suburb of Cleveland?  That's a definite indicator of trouble.  This morning, a book was being reviewed on NPR that was set in Newfoundland.  I know it's cold and rainy there, too, but I really, really want to go to that remote island and see the cod fishermen and the rocky, coastal villages.  I want to see what the people are like.  Did you know that they're almost 100% Welsh and Irish? 

Now is not a good time to sit on the banks of the Mississippi, but all the talk about the mighty river makes me just want to go see it.  Right now, I can't even see my own mountains for the clouds and the rain.  In my mind, I'm mapping out an all-encompassing road trip that starts out along the familiar I-80 through Wyoming to the fertile farmland of Nebraska and Iowa.  I'm going to have lunch at a pizza place in Chicago where I wrote "Scott and Circe" on a graffiti wall in 1989.  I'm going to see if it's still there.  I'll visit my Alma mater, show Scott where I lived in Bloomington, the route I walked to the practice building and the recital hall.  We'll go to the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, because we skipped it the last time Scott and I drove across the country.  We'll shoot across Pennsylvania and hit Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and D.C., where I can see cousins.  Then we'll head south to visit more cousins in Tennessee!  Keeping with the cousin idea, we'll drive all the way down the coast to Miami to see Tricia and the Bazails, then tool along the Gulf Coast through Pensacola, Mobile, New Orleans and Houston before crossing the great expanse of the West to bring us home.

I get this way in the springtime.  I used to really hop in my car and go.  Once I drove by myself from Utah to Wisconsin in one shot, listening to Wide Awake in America all through the night.  I stayed with friends in Madison and Milwaukee, eating burritos as big as my head for a few days before a harrowing last-minute race to Chicago to catch my flight to Spain.  A couple of years ago, I really wanted to drive down to Mexico and find a little rental on the Gulf of California, the inland side of Baja.  I looked on Google Earth and there was literally NOTHING there.  How could a place so close to the U.S. be devoid of infrastructure?  And then there is the drug trade to consider.  Kidnappings, shootings, all that non-family-friendly stuff.  So I stayed home.  No carefree road trip to Mexico in an ancient VW bus for our family.  It was just as well; we don't even own a VW bus.  Or a Grateful Dead album.

I love it here.  I belong here.  I'm a Utah girl with a beautiful life.

But I want to go!

                                                                               1989