Going On An Explore

 

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

“I always get to where I'm going by walking away from where I have been.”

—Winnie the Pooh

One of the things I love about Facebook and Instagram is that we get to see all the pictures being posted when people go on trips.  It’s fun to see them having fun and finding new places.  But it also makes me want to go somewhere.  It doesn’t have to be anywhere in particular, except that an explore must be to somewhere I’ve never been before.

When we first move to a new place, almost every day is an explore because so many of the places we go are places we’ve never been.  But as we become more familiar with an area, we have to be more intentional about taking time to go exploring.

An explore doesn’t necessarily require planning.  We can be driving along and see a road we’ve never been down, and so we’ll turn down that road, and, voila! An explore!

Over the years we’ve set some ground rules for explores. One is that we don’t start an explore too late in the day to get back home before dark.  It’s too easy to get very lost in the dark, especially without GPS, and besides, since the purpose of an explore is to see new places, there’s no point in going when you can’t see.

It’s very helpful to have a compass on an explore. One time we thought we were turning south toward home and instead we were turning north. We figured out we’d gone the wrong way when we’d gone much farther than it should have taken to get back to the road we’d started from. We kept going, but it took another five miles to figure out where we were because there were no road signs or landmarks, just miles and miles of trees.

Sometimes an explore will reveal a new way to get somewhere we’ve gone before, and other times an explore will take us to places we didn’t know existed.  Those are my favorites.  When we lived in the upstate of South Carolina, we were close enough to the edge of the state that explores would sometimes take us into Georgia or North Carolina.  There are lots of fun little towns hidden in those hills, and lots of historic places.  On one explore we ended up at Carl Sandburg’s house. It’s a museum now. We didn’t get to go inside, but there were fun trails around the property.

Now that we live in Kansas, it’s a little harder to go on explores.  We have to go farther to get beyond the places we know, partly because things are further apart here. Also, it’s easy to end up on dirt roads which often don’t have street signs.  Thank God for GPS!

I’m noticing that I’ve written this entire post in plural pronouns.  “We” go on explores together, “we” being whoever else is in the car. I’m not too inclined to go on explores alone.  They’re just not as much fun.

“Jobs fill your pockets, but adventures fill your soul.” - Jaime Lyn Beatty

“The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” -Thomas Alva Edison

Thanks, God.