travel | pg.4

In this two-part blog series, Wendy Worrall Redal explores our vanishing quiet places and what that loss could mean for us.

I look back at my reflection as I stand on my mat in Tadasana, Mountain Pose. The mirror is only large enough to offer balance and alignment to one person in the room, and since I am the only one here, there is no need for another. A familiar teacher’s voice is riding the breath of my laptop hum as she says to “fold forward and place your fingers around your big toes.” I listen, move, breathe. This is my new yoga studio. It’s in a room thousands of miles away from where I began practicing yoga, but the practice still feels close to home.

On Christmas morning in 1969, I opened a large package to find a new light-blue Jansport backpack, sized just right for a second-grader. I wasn’t too excited by my present then, but on its inaugural outing the next summer — a gentle 5-mile round-trip along the Baker River in Washington’s North Cascades — I began to discover the gifts that wilderness camping could bring.

My feet have served me well.

Although I wasn’t an early walker, I have always been an enthusiastic one. Family lore has it that I was tied like a dog to a stake in the backyard because I was such a dedicated wanderer. Living close to a river meant that my trailblazing could lead me to trouble, so my mother kept me tethered. I maintain that she could have simply kept an eye on me but, it being the ’60s and all, perhaps that would have cut into her cigarettes and activism.

My main goal at 12 years of age was to own a pair of plastic mouse ears, a salute to Mickey Mouse. Of course, this would require a vacation to Disney World, something every kid in my neighborhood had achieved. Getting there was possible … but sure looked unlikely. My parents, you see, saw no point in traveling to a fantasy world when the real world was so fantastical. I never did acquire that mouse-ear crown.

For a lot of eco-minded vagabonds there is a temptation to dismiss a Hawaiian vacation as too packaged and predictable: tourists in leis and aloha shirts, skyscrapers and beach-goers crowded into Waikiki or chi-chi resorts where the main activity is sitting by the pool sipping mai-tais with a little umbrella poking out of a pineapple slice.

But an alternate Hawaii exists, offering the active nature-lover an idyllic tropical escape from winter’s grip. The Garden Isle of Kauai is lush and laid back, high on beauty and outdoor adventure, low on pretension and crowds. And low on cost, too, with many free and inexpensive ways to explore its natural treasures.

In this era of relentless airline cost-cutting, it’s tough enough to fly these days, let alone during the holiday season when long lines, crowded planes and winter weather up the hassle factor. On top of those frustrations, almost every airline has now instituted a checked-bag fee, typically about $20 per bag each way.

I won’t have a computer, an iPod or even a cell phone on my nature trip. So don’t e-mail, voicemail, Facebook or even try to call me. Don’t even phone me on a landline. I can’t be reached. When I travel, I purposely sever all lines of communication with my everyday life. I think you should, too. Because when you don’t, I get annoyed.

I’m back from my vacation, and what an adventure it was.

And in addition to being great, I found it completely amazing how physically exhausting a vacation can be (tour bus pick-up at 6:30 a.m., plane rides, bus rides, and scary car episodes with a French taxi driver who insisted on taking all the Corsican island curves — which, did I mention, are only one lane — at 100 kilometers an hour by looking BACK at me so that I could confirm that yes, the island was beautiful, and yes, I was completely relaxed … just not right at that moment).

On a bookcase in my home office is a tiny piece of shed seal fur I spotted on a beach in New Zealand, a Douglas fir pine cone I absconded with from a forest floor in British Columbia, and a piece of shale I picked up from the rocky shores of Newfoundland. Looking at these mementos I’ve picked up on several journeys near and far reminds me of my travels; and arranged as they are in a circle, they create a “map” of sorts, a visual representation of where I’ve had the great fortune of going to in the world and the arc I traveled back home.