Resuming our trip, our first stop has been Washington, DC. All our trips become organized around Suzanne’s annual Flute Convention, which is in, yep, DC this year. Our car is filled with our camping gear and sits in an underground garage near DuPont Circle. The National Flute Convention has begun. We’ll be listening to lots of flute music and then head to West Virginia to camp along the Mountain Music Trail for a couple of weeks.

Every morning now in DC, I take a walk uphill to the National Cathedral. Discovering the wooded pathways on the grounds has been helpful because the purpose of these walks is twofold: One, to care for my back which needs daily exercise as pain relief; and two,to find a place to pray. No matter where I travel, I’m carrying my physical/spiritual worlds with me.

As we packed our bags into the car in Queens, I turned to Suzanne to tell her how anxious I was to leave home. She understood completely. The uncertainty about my mother, how much longer she has to live and how uncertainty can disrupt the need to follow the real rules of travel.

Those rules, because they are key to a successful trip, keep me focused and thus far able to enjoy a trip that could become undermined by sadness and anxiety. on the simplest level, travel for long periods of time demands paying attention to each single detail and then making room for the unexpected.

Suzanne gets annoyed with me as I nag her to put everything back where it was, to close lids and covers tightly, etc. If we don’t put things back in the car in the same place every time, we could lose a vital piece of equipment that we rely on for these camping trips. Having assigned places for everything means we don’t lose things, and we live in synch with the things we carry with us as if our lives depended on it–and they do.

That is what travel is about: Taking ourselves with us; taking care of everything we bring with us; allowing all uncertainty to come along for the ride; and to have fun (more fun than anyone can imagine).

This attention to detail changes us. Ironically, being extremely aware of each thing as it passes through our sensory system allows all those new sights, sounds, tastes, smells and feels to alter what we know and as we synthesize these sensations, we build new aspects of ourselves.

Travel changes us. Leaving home with an anxious heart is acknowledging that so much changes, not just for me but for lots of people connected through me to my mother lying in hospice in a state far away and not on our itinerary.

While we are traveling, we still need to keep funding our projects. Please make a donation here (and thanks): http://www.gofundme.com/yw769w