Where I usually start writing in French, this past month had me practice sharing my emotions in English, so I’m starting here to share the picture I’ve selected to summarize this special April…
This month was quite special indeed: we went for a 3-week family road-trip in the USA! It has been a dream I had for a while: show my native country to my kids as they are still young enough to enjoy traveling with us parents… And me reaching a birthday milestone felt like a good opportunity to make this dream come true!
I had been planning this trip for a few months, collecting ideas and testing itineraries both online (thank you for travel blogs for ideas… and spoilers!) and on paper (thank you for roadmaps that requires patience just to fold in the right direction!)…
Making choices, knowing that we will be only able to see a limited portion was an experience on itself. I had to trust that I would come back again some other time to see anything I might have missed, and had to accept that what I was planning to see was going to be enough to feed my need for amazement…
Anyway, once we had secured travel and accommodation, I stopped planning to leave room for the looking forward part that was already bringing so much joy…
Once the travel started, I was ready to take it all in! And I wasn’t disappointed: our travel started with a 24h flight delay that turned out to be a nice way get to see Iceland from the ground!
Arriving in the US, I got to (re)discover childhood memories of sunset colors, making me feel home…
And once we started hitting the road, landscapes turned to to be so breathtaking that I couldn’t help myself keeping my camera in my hand, ready to snap a picture at every turn! I was so happy not to have seen too many pictures of the places we drove through, I ended up discovering the various landscapes with fresh eyes, full of amazement!
Interestingly enough, while moving so fast across such beautiful scenery, I had mixed emotions… I had both the sense of timelessness and the sense of time flying by, that translated into this need to capture what I was seeing before the moment was over… Until I realized that another scenery even more amazing come before my eyes, and it started over again!
The accumulation of such increasing amazement turned out to be both exhilarating and exhausting, only to find relief at night time… before starting over the next day ;)
Out of the many places we visited, the Southwest ended up to be the one with the landscapes I enjoyed the most… Those warm red/pink/orange colors made me so happy! Is it because I don’t get to experience such colors in my immediate usual environment? Or because I simply love this color range…? I wouldn’t know, but the fact is, that my whole family couldn’t help but making fun of my so obvious strong feeling about those colors ;)
My kids now don’t have any doubt concerning my favorite color, and it makes me smile every time the color orange is mentioned :)
Not only did we got to experience the Southwest colors, we also got to experience the (end of) spring time in the desert: flowers were still blooming, allowing beautiful contrasts…
While I enjoyed the feeling of driving through beautiful fields of flowers that went on and on, I mostly cherished the time we went on a family walk to see them more up close… and I choose to stay behind to observe them in this unusual colored context…
I had noticed multiple flowers (one of which was orange, of course!) but the white ones where the ones that stood out the most…! I had noticed one that had its brightness contrasting with this warm red background and some snippets of green, so snap, there is it, a detail summarizing a full month…!
In the end, what I will take out of this travel is that where part of me felt we could have “done” more, my instinct in having padding in our schedule was worth it. We ended up alternating between traveling and resting, allowing us to enjoy nicely this trip as a whole family. I had experienced how finding a sustainable pace was precious!
And seeing how this picture is the first that came to mind even after thousands of snapshots taken makes me realize how vivid the emotion I felt when taking it: I was alone with my camera, having fun with some details I felt only I had seen…
The best is that what I had experienced something that I could also reproduce at home! It would “only” takes for me to find the pace and the place that fits me to maintain the joy of creativity that makes me feel myself :)
Will I be able to find that pace and place again soon? To be continued…!
In the meantime, I wish you a paceful (!) month of May :)
- Laetitia
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