I love to travel. I love planning a trip: figuring out the best places to go, things to see, activities to do, foods to try. I look forward to new sights and experiences. I even like process of traveling itself —all the rigmarole that goes into a long distance trip, transferring from a shuttle to a train to a plane to a bus, looking out streaky windows as the familiar world slides away and a new one looms just ahead.
But you know what you really need to feel like you’re on a vacation? You need to change your eyes. You can spend your whole life trying to put new things in front of your eyes, or you can look at the same things with eyes you haven’t used lately–the eyes of the newcomer, the eyes of an investigator, the artist’s eye.
Just the other day I went with my family to a creamery located on a farm not far from our house. We’ve been there at least a dozen times and it’s a lovely spot, but it’s not all that different from when we’ve been before (or for that matter any number of bucolic locations around where we are lucky enough to live). But as I stood there looking at the goats and the chickens and the hillside and the birds flitting about, I noticed things that I didn’t look closely at before. I was geographically in the same place I had been many times, but I truly felt like a tourist, soaking in the view and enjoying the awe that swelled up inside me.
I know I’m not saying anything new or revolutionary here, but it strikes me from time to time how much wonder we miss every day. Wherever you are, there are things you’ve never noticed before. Wherever you live, there are probably places nearby that people come from afar to marvel at. Not often enough, I stop and ask myself, “Wow–how much work did it take for people to build this?” or “How long did it take nature to grow or shift or change to make that?”
Not to get too philosophical here (too late), but I took a grad class about aesthetics — basically, what makes something beautiful. One of the theories that stuck with me was this: The aesthetic experience occurs any time something moves you from where you are to another mental state. When we look at something and it reminds us of another time or place, that’s an aesthetic experience. When something stirs an different emotional state in us (“emotion” really means “moving out of”), that is an aesthetic experience. It’s not about the newness of the picture, or the music, or the person, or the landscape, or the words, it’s about where it takes us internally. I imagine that many of our most intense and memorable experiences involved this kind of travel, this shift in our inner world.
So maybe, just maybe, if you look at the world from time to time with the willingness to examine it closely, and the openness to being moved, you really can take a vacation right where you are.
M. J. Lau 
Our family is planing a local day vacation to Helen, Ga. We’ve never been there, despite how close it is to us. It’s an old world German town and is used frequently as a backdrop in many films. I spend a lot of time in Atlanta, so I see a lot of sets and actors in the area, but Helen will be a break, as well be in the area when there will be no filming.
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Cool — I’ve never heard of Helen, but it does look like a charming little town!
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It does! Coy goes there often and loves it. Living in the south we don’t get many tastes of home,but there is an Amish store near us that we can get Lebanon bologna and Martin’s potato chips. You walk in and it smells like a market in Pa. Helen is similar to to German heritage of Pa. I was so excited to find these areas.
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