When despair grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
— Wendell Berry, The Peace of Wild Things
Our first full day on Kauai was one of our favorite parts of the entire trip and the one Ryan was most looking forward to: a boat tour of the Nā Pali coast. I’m slightly scared of boats and majorly scared of the open ocean, so the prospect of being on a raft flying across deep, deep water didn’t excite me, per se. However, I faced my fears, and this turned out to be one of my favorite things we did while in Hawaii.
Read MoreIt’s at about this time every year that I get horribly nostalgic. Facebook and Instagram are flooded with those “remember what you were doing X years ago” posts—all photos from my time studying abroad in Oxford, England, three years ago. It’s not so much wanderlust that compels me to be mopey and stare at my Oxford photos for an hour at this time of the year; it’s missing the quotidien of living in another place, the same melancholy I get thinking about Kentucky now that I’m in Minnesota. It’s missing eating Nando’s at least once a week, going to lectures in beautifully old stone buildings crawling with ivy, hot chocolate and millionaire’s shortbread from Caffé Nero, the Marston footpath being flooded from the relentless rain, and waiting for my creative writing tutorial on a bench beside the river.
Read MoreOur first day started bright and early at 8:30 a.m. for the Roma Antica Tour through Context Travel (this tour was a Christmas gift from my mom, and it was one of my favorite parts of the trip!). Our guide, Valeria, was an archaeologist who had studied at UC Berkeley and Oxford, and I learned more about Roman history than I could ever hope to retain. We began the tour by skipping the (incredibly long) line to the Colosseum, as Valeria explained that the holes in the walls we often saw in ancient Roman buildings were spots for metal clamps, as most of these ancient structures were overlaid with marble.
Read MoreLocated in Frankfort, Kentucky, the mid-point between the much larger cities of Lexington and Louisville, Buffalo Trace Distillery looks dingy in the gray light of December. This can be attributed to the black fungus clinging to the trees and buildings—a fungus almost entirely unique to distilleries. The "angel's share," bourbon that evaporates from the barrels during the aging process, serves as a food source for the fungus and allows it to thrive.
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