Learning To Travel

Teaching you how far you can travel!

Dickens Travels Archive

Simple Gifts

Inspiration

This post is an archive of the email newsletter I sent on April 09, 2013. If you’d like to receive my letters as they are sent please enter your email in the form below this post. I send out about one letter a week with thoughts and photos from our year of global travel.

I am writing this on day #9 of our travels and we are thankful that we decided to spend the first month here in Mexico. Joyce gets to surf every day and I am writing more and more every day.

Even though it has only been a little over a week we have already begun to establish a new routine and I am enjoying how much simpler life is here.

Our wedding song is Simple Gifts which is a Shaker song written by Joseph Brackett in 1848. And we choose it because we wanted to live the message that is found in the song:

‘Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free
‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gain’d,
To bow and to bend we shan’t be asham’d,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come ’round right.

Joyce and I spent a lot of time in her driveway learning to dance to the song way back in 2001. And now it feels as though our lives are beginning to truly dance to that song’s spirit.

It is most obvious in our food and our transportation. Since we do not have a car here we walk wherever we need to go. And since there is not a single supermarket in town our diet has become made up of mostly fresh fruits and vegetables bought at fruit stands with occasional street tacos thrown in.

You buy the fruit here ripe and ready to eat so there is no need to buy a huge quantity, usually just enough for the next meal or two. And getting to eat fresh fruit so close to the source is truly a simple gift.

We spend time walking together and talking more, we sit on the beach and watch the sunset and the surfers and life is good. I am thankful for this trip and I am thankful that I get to do this once in a lifetime experience with Joyce. That is the best gift of all.

Daryle

My Heart Overflows With Gratitude

Our Travel Stories

My Heart Overflows

I am writing this while lounging in a hammock that is strung up next to the open-air kitchen that is at our cabin in Sayulita, Mexico. It is sunny, it is warm, there is a slight breeze, and a variety of tropical birds sing in the trees.

In respect to how I am accustomed to spending my days, this is quite surreal, especially when I stop and think that this is just day #2 of a yearlong adventure.

My heart overflows with gratitude that I am able to do this.

The final months, weeks, and days of leaving our home of ten years in Fort Collins where very hectic and busy. There was just so much to be done in order to get ready for this trip. So much in fact that it would not have been possible without help from others.

I am humbled by just how much support and help we received from friends and family.

And I do hope that everyone who did help knows how much we appreciate the assistance they gave us. As we travel I will work to find ways to help others as well as show gratitude to those back home.

For now, I will just say “Thank You” to those who helped us and continue to help us as we deal with the final details remotely.
(You know who you are.)