Hello world!

This is the first post in the second chapter of our family's amazing travel adventures. You can read about our first big trip here: www.sapporostories.blogspot.com. In the fall of 2008, the five of us left a small southern Canadian town to spend four months living in northern Japan, in beautiful Sapporo, a city of two million. There, John taught classes at Hokkai Gakuen University, the kids went to Japanese yochien (preschool / kindergarten), and I tried to keep up with my regular editing work and get back in the habit of writing.

This time, we're heading in the other direction -- to France and England where we will spend the first half of 2010. From January to May, we will be living in a beautiful wine-making village of 400 where John will be writing up several research projects during part of his year-long study leave/sabbatical, the kids will be attending a French école (preschool and primary school), and I plan to keep up with my regular editing work and get back in the habit of writing.


This trip will take me back to a place I love -- the Bourgogne (Burgundy) region of France. I spent the first half of 1993 living with a French family there in Dijon, in what was probably the most formative (and fabulous) big trip of my life. By some amazing stroke of fate (and with the wonders of the internet), we have found a beautiful house to rent in a village about 20 miles away from my old stomping grounds.


Thinking about that trip brought me back to an old favorite friend, Walt Whitman, who inspired me throughout that adventure. When I left, I scrawled one of his poems in the front of the first of five journals I kept while I was there... from his "Song of the Open Road" in Leaves of Grass.  I feel compelled to "scrawl" the same verses into this 21st journal now.


AFOOT and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.

The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

****

Allons! the road is before us!
It is safe - I have tried it - my own feet have tried it well - be not detain'd!
Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the shelf unopen'd!
Let the tools remain in the workshop! let the money remain unearn'd!
Let the school stand! mind not the cry of the teacher!
Let the preacher preach in his pulpit! let the lawyer plead in the court, and the judge expound the law.

Camerado, I give you my hand!
I give you my love more precious than money,
I give you myself before preaching or law;
Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?