Some people are travelers. They have the desire or need to see and experience as many different places as possible on this vast yet tiny globe that humanity inhabits. I am not one such. While I have traveled to a number of different places,  I have made but two great journeys in my life and both of them have been journeys of the heart. The first was when I moved my suitcases across the Hudson River from my birthplace of New Jersey to New York City. There I found the city of my heart and thought I would stay there the rest of my life. My second great journey was across a wider river of water to Stockholm, Sweden because it was there my heart found love.

Many of the people I have met here in Stockholm in the 25 plus years I’ve lived here are the traveller type. While on their journeys around the world they somehow for one reason or another have ended up here in my little corner of the world. And they continue to use this corner as a stepping off place from which to continue to explore the other places they are curious about. But this little corner of mine has become, for me, more like the last stop on the bus line. Not really a final destination but just the last stop, from which the bus goes no further.

Now this doesn’t mean that I haven’t been anywhere except Budd Lake, NJ or New York City or Stockholm. I have travelled a bit in my life. I’ve been to Washington DC to visit with my roommate Roz and again to various towns in Maine to see her there too. I spent a great month in California when I visited another of my roommates, Lynne. We spent hours building up our tans round her swimming pool, then happy hour at the local Mexican restaurants drinking frozen margaritas. Together we traveled the coast road to San Francisco and went to the San Diego Zoo to see the Kuala bears. Greensboro, North Carolina is another place I’ve been to when I drove down there with three friends in a noisy Volkswagen bus to visit one more former roommate. On the way we stopped in a few local southern diners who’s customers didn’t seem to look too fondly on the four of us in our ratty bell-bottomed jeans and long, below-shoulder length hair (the two guys included). I’ve been to the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York to visit my friends Tom and Wally at their 100-year-plus house and they drove me on country roads up and down the very green hills. I took the train to Washington DC to visit my New York City friend Nancy after she moved there. And I saw the sights of Philadelphia when I went there to stay with Linda who I had gotten to know here in Sweden. I took the train down to the south of Sweden to visit Gerd at her house near Trelleborg. I’ve been to Denver, Colorado where one of my besties from Pratt Art school, Irene, lived with her husband. They took me up to walk amid the Rocky Mountains. I’ve been to Florida a few times. First to Hollywood, where my grandmother lived and later to Miami where my former Philadelphia pal, Linda, had relocated to. I went there with my husband and son and while there we, of course, couldn’t avoid taking in the sights of Disney World, Sea World and all the other theme parks in Orlando. I’ve even been to Heidleburg Germany when Håkan and I drove down there to visit my cousin Devorah and her husband and kids who were living there.

So I have traveled around a bit. But if you look to see what the common denominator has been for all these trips it wasn’t because I wanted to see interesting places in the world. It was because I had people I knew in those places. The reason I traveled to those places was because I wanted to see the people not the scenery. I saw a bit of scenery on the side but it was the chance to once again meet the people I knew that enticed me enough to go to the trouble of packing my bags and going out on the road. Without the people, and the stories we shared, the places are just places. And I have to admit that in regard to places, the place I love the best is often one I find in my own home, where I can sit on the sofa, with my shoes off. And just relax with a good book. That’s really the only traveling I need.