I had my first travel experience when my mother took me with her to visit a friend in Kansas City.  We boarded the train in Scammon, KS.  I guess you could say that trip plus a big road trip with my parents and grandparents to California when  I was seven set the desire in me to travel and see things beyond the rural farm area I grew up in in Southeast Kansas.  I love SE Kansas but there is so much more to experience in this big wide world.

     I guess that was why I jumped at the chance to make a second trip to Rome with the choir because we would be traveling to towns where we hadn’t gone before, 12 years ago.

     It is a long flight from KCI to Italy but it was amazing some of the things I viewed, looking out my window.  As we approached Rome, we flew over snow covered Alps.  What a beautiful site with the sun coming up over the horizon!  Many villages could be spotted in the mountain valleys, appearing so very small from our very high vantage point.  The morning we left Rome we flew over the mountain range that runs the length of the Italian peninsula known as the Apennine Mountains. I hadn’t heard of them before. Then as we left Newark on our way home to Chicago and KCI we saw the Appalachian mountains  below us.  Not as much snow cover on them as the Alps but still a wonderful sight.  I have traveled through them several times in different states  but the view from the air was special.

     I often hear comments about how we American’s don’t take good care of many of the buildings here so when they get to be 65-100 years old the solution is to tear them down and build a new one, in today’s world often replaced with a metal building.  That is so true in this country.

     Those old buildings that have been preserved and taken care of are a big part of the tourist draw to so many European towns and countries.

One of the town we visited and stayed in two nights was Assisi, Italy.

The basement and lower level of our hotel dated back 3,653 years.  It had been many things from a private mansion hundreds of years ago, then many businesses and now a hotel.  We stayed in the old Assisi on the hillside with it’s narrow winding streets, quaint shops, and narrow sidewalks, when there was a sidewalk.  Walking surface was uneven but everyone is responsible for themselves.  No worries about lawsuits like here in this country.  It was here we saw the tomb of St. Francis of Assisi and sang at a mass in the basilica built over his tomb.  The line was long down the narrow stairway to his tomb but well worth it.  The modern town of Assisi is at the foot of the very steep hills that make up the old Assisi.

     The experience of travel widens our perspective on our world and the other people we share it with.   I know some have no desire to leave what they have always known as it is comfortable.  Thankfully, I am not one of them.  I am ready for new places, experiences and meeting new people at the drop of a hat, as they say.