I love where I live. I love Baltimore. I love my job, the places I get coffee during the day, my bike ride to work. I love my friends and family and social networks in Baltimore. I love my apartment and relaxing and reading here.
But I feel deeply infected with some kind of restlessness. Maybe it’s because it’s summer and I work in higher education. Maybe it’s the whole trying to have a baby thing but of course not knowing when/if it’s worked. Or it could even be that I haven’t been able to get away from my normal life for more than a day or two at a time for too long. Even that the stupid person who ran my foot over prevented me from going on my favorite camping trip of the year over Memorial Day.
I can’t tell where this wanderlust is coming from or what will slake it. Extended travel is out of the question for at least the next year, save a trip to Illinois for dissertation defenses. We might be able to get away for a day or even a long weekend, but that’s it. I don’t think I’m going to get to go camping until October, and then I have to help run a large camping trip — so it will be more work than relaxing.
I know — who gets to travel as much as they want to? I should feel lucky that I get to travel the little bit I do.
Hi,
I just wanted to apologize for goobing up your blog back on your post about Tienanmen — no excuse for raiding a blog and blathering on about why I don’t like an author or a group of words in a rant completely removed from the substance of your post! Made myself look quite the fool, I think.
I’ve never been able to stay long anywhere on the East Coast — the degree to which the stars are obscured is extraordinarily depressing to me. There are exceedingly few tiny areas of North America east of the Mississippi where night skies are unaffected by artificial light:
http://www.lightpollution.it/worldatlas/pages/fig2.htm
I’d love to live somewhere in British Columbia the Rockies where the night skies are as beautiful as they were before we harnessed electricity. But then I wouldn’t get the social and cultural benefits of a metropolis… somehow I think I’d take a clear night sky to the benefits of a big city if it came down simply to that choice, and I could still travel out to a big city if needed. The biggest pain in the butt would be lack of broadband internet, but what with satellite service that could be overcome (it just has very high latency compared to cable or optical).
I remember hiking around the Porcupine Mountains State Park and then Isle Royale National Park in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan — beautiful skies up there. If you’ve never been out to Isle Royale, I can’t recommend it enough. There’s Keweenaw National Historical Park, too, but it’s rather small in comparison, and private… there’s a great bit of info on the oldest and largest exposed lava flow on the surface of earth there, which brought up the pure copper that was mined decades ago.
I, too, would like to go camping and hiking again, but time and money are always constraints. I think if I were to win the lotto, I’d sell my home, buy a modest house somewhere on a secluded property and then get a camper and spend the rest of my life traveling around North America. I’d still surely miss out on loads of stuff, but I’d enjoy every minute of it.
And, y’know — this is totally removed, btw — it just confounds me how people can have millions upon millions of dollars and end up broke. It wouldn’t take me but one solid million (probably even less!) and I’d be set for life!
No worries, Mr. Jambe. :)
I used to live in FAR Southern Illinois, and we had some very very fine night skies there. But if you traveled an hour in any direction, it started to brighten up. You’re right; it IS depressing sometimes to what extend we can see the night sky on the Coast. I took astronomy at a college right outside Baltimore. That was some disappointing lab work. :)