This weekend’s question comes from reader Anne-Kari, who wants to know:
How many different countries have you visited? What’s the favorite place to which you’ve traveled? (That could be a country or city or even as specifically local as a park or neighborhood or field or street.)
Lessee: I’ve been to the United States, Canada, England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, Iceland, and France. (I’ll add Belgium in December when I do a Eurostar Christmas-market shopping day in Brussels.) As world travel goes, that’s pretty pathetic… but I’m still better traveled than many Americans. On the other hand, there are many places in the U.S. that I have not seen that I would love to visit. Around the U.S., I’ve been through much of the Northeast, a good chunk of Pennsylvania, Washington DC, Baltimore, the Orlando area, Northwest Arkansas, Southern California, Las Vegas, Denver, the width of Tennessee (including Memphis, Nashville, and the Smoky Mountains), parts of Missouri and Oklahoma (including St. Louis, Joplin, and Tulsa), … and I think that’s it. I’ve never seen the Grand Canyon, San Francisco, Seattle, Austin, Chicago, the Great Plains, the Florida Keys, Honolulu, Miami, or Niagara Falls. Globally, I’d love to travel across the Atlantic by ship. I’d love to see Tuscany, the South of France, Egypt, Cape Town, the Serengeti, Scandinavia, Buenos Aires, all of Australia and New Zealand, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Thailand, India… aw, hell, pretty much everywhere, though the places where they make women cover up from head to toe are lowest on the list.
And then I want to go Mars.
My favorite place ever visited? I think perhaps the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, which is one of the most spectacular manmade spaces I’ve ever seen, a beautiful melding of landscape and structure that I responded to with an almost religious feeling both relaxtion and a heightened attunement to my surroundings. I didn’t even see any of the art! I was with bronxbee and we just wandered the grounds soaking in the magnificence that is its blending of inside and outside spaces and its flow with the landscape.
You?
This QOTW comes via a previous QOTW, which asked “What kinds of things would you like to learn about your fellow FlickFilosopher readers?” Feel free to continue adding suggestions there for me to grab for future use.
(If you have a suggestion for a QOTD/QOTW, feel free to email me. Responses to this QOTW sent by email will be ignored; please post your responses here.)
