And Other Random Things You See in Illinois

On the way to Chicago to catch a flight to Europe last year, I saw a boxy peach-colored church along the highway. It was named “The Friendly Temple of God in Jesus Christ.” 

Am I the only one who gets an image of robe-clad Levitical priests with censers loudly greeting people and handing out bulletins?

~~~

Painted Desert, Arizona

Vanilla and Butter, or, The Need for a Food-Buying Intervention

Whenever I go to the grocery store, I always buy certain things. Zach and I go through some staples at an alarming rate, so I always put them on my list, regardless of whether or not I’ve checked the cupboards. Last week, I discovered two bottles of vanilla squirreled away in the back shelf, in addition to the half-empty bottle I already had. Three bottles of vanilla! How silly of me! 

As is my habit, yesterday while grocery shopping I bought a pound of butter (in addition to about thirty pounds of other food which I carried in my backpack from Aldi to my house). What I didn’t notice was that when I threw it in the left-hand corner of the top shelf, behind the milk, it was joining a breeding ground. Later last night, when I was rearranging the refrigerator, Zach asked, “Why did you tell me to buy butter the other day?”

I shrugged. “We go through butter really fast,” I said.

Zach stared hard into the back left-hand corner. Then he began pulling out packets of butter. More and more and more of them.

We ended up with this:

We had six pounds of butter in the fridge.

SIX POUNDS.

(And that’s not even counting the half-pound of clarified butter in the cupboard.)

We fell on the floor, we were laughing so hard. And Zach said, “You need to write a blog about this.”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I do.”

~~~

Travel Tip Tuesdays: Sparking Creativity on the Road

Any kind of art, be it writing, music, or painting, thrives on routine. When I fall into a pattern of everyday habits, boy, am I productive. I get stuff done, I accomplish tasks, I pound out word counts, and I keep the ice cube tray filled. But too much routine can eventually turn your brain to mush, and it’s important to shake yourself up every once in a while.

There are many ways to do this, but one of the best ways is to take a trip, no matter how short. Just getting away from your familiar haunts can wake you up in a powerful way. Here are seven ways that you can use travel (or shorter excursions from home) to spark your creativity.

1. Do something out of the ordinary. Get lost in a city, talk to homeless people, hike a dangerous trail, make pancakes without a recipe (believe me, this was a big deal when I first did it). Use a trip as an excuse to do something you wouldn’t normally do, which will stimulate you in new ways.

"Here I am in 'The Shakespeare Garden.'
I am totally waxing poetic right now."

2. Read a book. Travel is a great time to read that book (or two or three) that you haven’t gotten around to in your everyday life. Reading or listening to a good book will always stimulate your mind, no matter your art form.

3. Immerse yourself in something unfamiliar. Growing up in the conservative Midwest, I had never spent a significant amount of time with hardcore politically-liberal people before the autumn of 2010. Two weeks of picking blueberries with amazing crazy hippies shook up my world and made me think about the liberal perspective in a whole new way. These experiences will make you a more well-rounded person, which then makes you a better artist.

I drew this in Florida.

4. Sightsee purposefully. Don’t just rush through the sights because you have to— choose which ones really interest you and spend some time with them. It doesn’t matter if everyone tells you to go to the Golden Gate Bridge: if you want to spend the whole day at Alcatraz, then spend the whole day at Alcatraz. (Or, in my case, vice versa.)

5. Talk to people. People are the best inspiration of all, and you can meet some pretty awesome/crazy/crazy-awesome people on the road! If you’re unsure how to engage people, try these tips.

6. Engage in a different creative form. I’m a writer, so when I traveled, I drew a lot and played music wherever I could find a piano. A different art form engages your brain in a new and powerful way.

7. Let your mind rest. When I’m at home, I’m constantly thinking of my to-do list. A trip gives you permission to take a break from all that. Don’t worry about the things you need to do. And don’t fry your brain with Facebook, either— learn to spend time without the noise. It’s amazing what kinds of creativity can spring forth in the midst of silence.

~~~

Cheap Factory-Made Woolly Bears

On our walk to Pere Marquette last week, Zachary and I saw lots of caterpillars crawling across the roads. For the first twenty or so I stopped and made a little squee and talked about how cute they were, but for the next several dozen I was content to simply look at them. 

The most common caterpillar we saw was the Woolly Bear, a caterpillar which turns into the Isabella Tiger Moth. This is what one looks like as a caterpillar:

And this Wikipedia link will show you the moth they turn into, as well as some crazy facts (they freeze solid during the winter, apparently!).

Farmers’ lore says that you can tell how long the winter is going to be by looking at the band of orange-brown between a wooly bear’s black ends. If it’s narrow, the winter will be harsh. If it’s wide, the winter will be mild.

I, of course, got the prediction backwards, and so spent the entire walk exclaiming what a crazy harsh winter this was going to be! The band was very wide in every caterpillar we saw. Some of the caterpillars had barely a smidgen of black on either end, and others only had a black end on their head. Zach remarked that they look like they had been cut from one long cylinder of striped fuzz.

“There must be a factory where a slicer cuts off the little segments,” Zach said. “But the slicer isn’t very precise, so the caterpillars all look different.”

Within seconds, we had determined that these caterpillars were the result of a cheap factory line (probably made in China), being mass-produced and edging out the good old-fashioned handmade woolly bears. “Why, in my day, our caterpillars were painstakingly handcrafted, not like this cheap factory junk. And they had uniform bands of color, doggonit!”

Have I mentioned that I love autumn, long walks, and my husband?

~~~

Twin Fawns and Mother, San Juan Island, Washington

15 Reasons I Love Autumn

(Halfway through this list, I realized that many of these reasons have less to do with autumn and more to do with summer being over. But if you live in St. Louis, you can agree with me that summer being over is the best part of autumn, anyway.)

1. Bonfires.

2. Food roasted over bonfires.

3. Good hiking weather.

4. The sun being mild enough that I don’t get sunburned.

5. The sound of migrating geese overhead (even though the majority of geese in St. Louis don’t migrate).

6. 80 degrees seeming cool after the murderously hot summer.

7. Wearing boots.

8. Watching my breath smoke in the air.

9. A holiday that involves both costumes and candy.

10. The colors, not only of the changing leaves, but of the grasses and sunlight.

11. Wearing clothes for fashion instead of figuring out how to dress in a way to avoid both sunburn and heatstroke.

12. Hot soups and stews tasting good again.

13. Crunching dry leaves underfoot.

14. Wearing long sleeves, which double as mittens and potholders.

15. The harvest moon.

What would you add to this list?

A 20-Mile Stroll to Pere Marquette

For months now, Zachary and I have been talking about walking to Pere Marquette State Park. We kept on deciding against it, mostly because we’d need some willing victims to meet us for a picnic out there to justify the walk, and also because the summer weather is not the greatest for a twenty-mile jaunt. But yesterday, with a cloudy autumn sky, a chilly breeze blowing, and my brother and mom interested in a picnic by the river, we found the perfect time.

We left around 9:30 from my parents’ house, which was marginally closer to our destination. After a mile of walking along a busy street and through a strip of fast-food joints and gas stations, we turned to the left, skirted an industrial district, and found ourselves on a wide open country road.

For a couple hours we rambled along the roads by cornfields and farmhouses. We even saw two bald eagles wheeling far overhead, cackling to each other in metallic-sounding chuckles. Eventually we reached the Golden Eagle Ferry, which (for $3 a head), bore us across the Mississippi River to the banks of Calhoun County, Illinois. 

The roads in Calhoun County are narrow, tortuous, and full of steep hills, winding us through forests, along sweeping empty hillsides of harvested barley, and past peach orchards, mansions, trailer homes, and roadside stores that sell sorghum molasses by the quart. Our road took us through a neighborhood on the spine of Calhoun County, where the land fell away on either side, showing us broken woods and farmland to the right, and densely-wooded countryside to the left that obscured the rivers and marched up to the bluffs where Pere Marquette resides. (Unfortunately, I considered it too much work to dig through the backpack for a camera at this point, so I have no photos of that.)

Next our road plunged downward, and within a couple hours we found ourselves walking on the shoulder of a highway that delved through the heart of the Two Rivers Wildlife Preserve, a wetlands habitat reserved for migrating birds. We saw few birds, but  discovered a storm of grasshoppers. When we walked in the grass to avoid getting hit by cars, hundreds of grasshoppers, large and small, bounded out of our way.

Our final road in Calhoun County looped around a neighborhood by the waters of the Illinois River, where all the houses stand on stilts. As Zach and I walked, two friendly dogs ran over to check us out, and we chatted with their owner, a middle-aged woman in a floral print dress, standing on the stairs that led up to her house. She was curious about the backpack, and we told her that we were walking to Pere Marquette from St. Charles. Her response was, “Why?”

We crossed the Brussels Ferry, walked along a shoulder of the busy road for a while, then took to the bike trail that led us to the park. We were now racing my brother and mom, and managed to arrive at the picnic area about five minutes before they did. We laid down on the concrete and let out sighs of relief (in between me incessantly yelling, “Boo-ya!”). The walk, from start to finish, was a bit more than 20 miles.

Christian and Mom arrived with picnic gear in hand, and I limped over to greet them.

“So, we going to do any hiking?” Christian asked.

I looked at Zach. Zach looked at me. We both shrugged.

So we went hiking.

Travel Tip Tuesdays: Solitude and the Road

Hiking solo near Denver, Colorado, 2011.

Some people excel at solitude— they love being alone, they’d rather be alone, and they have to force themselves to be around people at all.

I am not one of those people. 

One of the toughest adjustments of being married has been all the solitude. It’s strange to me to spend a whole day without speaking to or seeing anyone else. So it may seem odd that, when I was single, I loved solo traveling. 

I’ve written about solo travel before, showing that it need not involve a lot of solitude. But still, no matter how many hostels you visit or volunteer situations you encounter, you will have a lot of alone time. How does someone who doesn’t like solitude learn to enjoy it?

This is a difficult blog to write, because everyone experiences solitude in a different way. I’m an extrovert: I tend to experience things as they happen to me instead of within me. That said, I often find myself zoning out, losing focus, or getting lost in meaningless thoughts. I’ll do my best to cover some of the bases, but I’m sure there will be a lot of you who see the giant holes in the ideas I’m covering. When you do, let me know— I’m always fascinated to hear from people who are fundamentally different from me.

Engage with the physical. One of the most important parts of enjoying solitude is to get out of your own head and into your physical body more. The more engaged you are with your surroundings, the more vivid your trip will be (and this will also give you more to think about— see point #2). Bring a camera and use the lens to help you experience detail. Try something new. Get yourself lost in a city and explore. People-watch. Touch the moss on the tree. Smell the seaweed on the docks. Taste the local cuisine. Eavesdrop on conversations. Try to put these sensations into words. Focus on the moment. Your physical experience will greatly impact your mental one.

Engage with the mental. I mentioned earlier that I zone out— that’s not the same as exploring your own head. Traveling shakes you up and refreshes your mind, but, if you’re like me, you have to be intentional about engaging with this part of yourself. Seek out new ideas. Think about what you’ve learned or experienced today. If words are your medium, keep a journal or a blog. Let your creativity flow. Draw something. Free-write. Read that book you’ve been meaning to get around to. Think about the chance conversations you had today. Pay attention to the historic plaques and the state park signs that explain the definition of brackish water. The more you stimulate your mind, the more you’ll have to think about. 

Engage with the spiritual. There are plenty of books about “connecting with your inner spirit” or whatever, but since I’m a Christian, I will speak to Christians here. We believe in a personal God, so engaging with your spiritual life does not involve tapping a vague energy or life-force— it means spending time with Someone. Solitude has been a spiritual discipline from the early days of the church, modeled by Jesus and many others. Travel strips away a lot of the walls and pretensions that we build for ourselves, and it can bring us closer to God in a powerful way. Pray. Read the Bible. Ponder and memorize scripture. Talk to God while you’re waiting for the bus or walking on the beach or trying to get the guy at the hostel to stop hitting on you. Keep your eyes and heart open to what God is trying to tell you.

In short, the key to solitude is focus. It’s too easy to zone out and sleepwalk through everything, but travel, and especially solo travel, is an invitation to sharpen our eyes, our minds, and our hearts through solitude.

~~~

Have a travel question? Leave a comment!

Highway at Sunset, Tennessee