Slow Travel: Seeing more by seeing less

   

  Common picture of the central court of the British Museum. It is common because there 

is a window on one of the upper floors that demands use as a photo frame. Photo by Mike

        Ted, a friend, covered the Holy Land and Mediterranean in five days.  His photos were all blurred because they were taken out of a moving bus.
Unlike Ted, my wife and I like to travel, but even more, we like to stay and visit.
A trip is to go somewhere and use it as headquarters for getting to know an area.
We went on six day-hikes in the rain forest near Sooke on Vancouver Island, British Columbia.  Another year we stayed five days in a house on a bay overlooking the world’s largest oyster bed on San Juan Island, Washington.
We spent four days with Jacki, the owner of a bed and breakfast in Kirkcudbright, a small village in Scotland.  Upon returning a person told us on their tour of Scotland they met a couple from Iowa with whom they became good friends.  I had to admit most of the Iowans I've met were in Iowa.
Four evenings of watching fireflies from the porch of a two hundred year old house on an Amish farm outside Lancaster, PA may seem boring to some who count adventures in miles.
You can spend a week in the Smithsonian and not see it all.  It is like the British Museum where you can spend a whole day looking at ancient Egyptian artifacts. The best thing, however, about the British Museum is sitting in the central court having a beer while reading the guide book before visiting another corner of the building.  The British Museum is free and free is good too.
As a kid, before auto air conditioning, we would start at five o’clock in the morning by two lane highway.  Timing it right we could cross four states before it got hot and we would stop.  I saw little.
With this same model one can cover the Eastern Seaboard in a week and not remember anything.  Was that Old Ironsides or the restored Mayflower or the Merrimack?
My wife and I spent a week looking at rocks around a conference center in northern New Mexico.  All rocks are not alike. Oh, and while we were there, we did meet a nice couple from New Mexico.