Doing Everything in Love: i can't get enough of our world

Monastery outside Barcelona

Streets of Toledo

I crave adventure...

It's not that I'm unfulfilled after exploring a place, or unable to be filled with the amazingness of our adventures. It's just that every destination we visit makes me long for the next one.

And I can't quite pinpoint what it is about experiencing a new cultures that drives us to live the way we do. Perhaps it's the people that we share our lives with when we travel, like the driver in Peru who transported me to and from different locations in the mountains when Annie and I went parasailing. With my limited spanish, we somehow talked about his children and his growing up in a small village. Or the couple in Germany whom we talked to for hours at the Chinese beer garden over a large frosty beverage about the European's general perceptions of Americans and how we should stay away from Oktoberfest. And Rella! Oh how I love Rella, our friend's parents' housekeeper, who grew up in the Philippines and has served in households to put her daughter through college and to give her son a better life.

I. Love. People.

Peruvian farmers who so generously roasted up some guinea pig for lunch

We don't have money stored up. I drive a car that at any minute threatens explosion or abandonment on the highway. Half my clothes are from Goodwill, and our couch has a distinct funk to it from allowing a lab to burrow into the comfort of its cushions. Most of our travels have involved people who were already there; free housing equals "we'll make it happen" in the Checchia household, because there's half your cost of traveling right there. It's just always worked out somehow.

Singapore

A student said the other day, "Dang, Mrs. Checchia. I want to go to all these places you keep talking about." I share my travels with my kiddos constantly because I hope it will instill in them a tiny seed for big adventures.