My Travels Few and Far Between

I have written before on this blog that I have a tendency to be a homebody, seldom traveling.  That doesn't mean that I dislike travel, though.  But I tend to regard my "voyages" as adventures akin to the mythical Sinbad's, when he would tire of his mundane, humdrum life in Baghdad and then do set out on an adventure.  Naturally, my adventures probably haven't been as dangerous as those of this fictional character, but then again I don't think Sinbad ever rode the Interstate down a curving, steep mountain gorge in the middle of a driving storm at night or ran down the beach in the middle of a severe lightning storm with bolts crashing down all around.  Well, we all have our own little personal "danger" memories, don't we? Well, at least those of us do who survived them, I suppose...

It's nice to go someplace interesting every now and then, and of course visiting relatives (who from my experience almost never live anywhere interesting) is always on the agenda of things to try to get around doing (occasionally).  But all things said, I usually would just as soon stay at home.

The late legendary science fiction writer Clifford Simak wrote a short story, one of my all-time favorites, about this tendency on the part of people like me to avoid travel.  Titled The Huddling Place, the story's setting is a future where people can surround themselves with all of the creature comforts and necessities they could use without ever leaving their home estates, making extensive use of automation, environmental controls, and robots. The Huddling Place had one of the most significant and sobering endings that I have ever read, and its lesson has never left me.  Instead, it has prodded me to try to resist this instinctive tendency of mine to stay put, at home, and in the "security" of my routine day-to-day existence (not that I have to concern myself with fending off any presumptuous robots, at least not yet).  Try to read Simak's tale if you can find it somehow.

I have been a Florida resident since 1957.  I have never been abroad.  The furthest west I have been was Dallas, Texas in 1994 (retracing JFK's assassination route) and the furthest north was in Manhattan's Central Park just north of the Metropolitan Museum of Art a couple of years ago.  I have flown on planes on two different trips.  In my lifetime (well, maybe once I was on a plane in infancy, but forgive me for not remembering).  As far as the states in which I have ever been (on the ground), here they are: Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, New Jersey, New York, and Virginia.  Thirteen states in 55 years: that's it, and with the last one on the list I was there only for a few months during infancy and remember nothing.   Not that I'm complaining ...