Travel Journal, 40
This is not a story about traveling. It could be. I have a lot of stories (as by now I’m sure you can tell). Each one of them burst from my mind, begging me to tell them. This story, by all rights, should be a travel story. It should be; but it’s not.
As much as my heart races when I pack my backpack, as much as it thrills me to talk to people about travel, as much as I absolutely adore a group text about going someplace new, and as much as the thought of figuring out yet another foreign train system keeps me up at night, another aspect of travel gives me far more joy.
We sat around a table set for feasting. The table was laid with trimmings of a Thanksgiving Day. Though still a month away, we met together to celebrate one of the most important parts of travel: the friends that go with you.
This small group is niche and knit together by various ages of people from differing walks of life. It’s an uncanny collective, a peculiar mix, a match only made in heaven by a God who could see the dots that needed connecting. And connect them, he did.
The six of us have traveled to the far reaches of the globe in each other’s shadows. But this isn’t a travel story. This is a Thanksgiving story. (Friends-giving?)
We sat around a table in North-Central Minnesota, celebrating togetherness. Some of us live here. Some of us live across the world. But each of us belonged at this table. Travel has meant so much to us; seeing places and people and sights and scenery. But travel would have so little value had we done so alone. We’ve walked together, rode elephants together, driven cars on the other sides of roads together, and eaten ridiculous amounts of ramen together. When it’s over we go back to our respective lives. But we somehow find ourselves meeting, once again, in another part of the world, ready to take it all on, together.
The world was created for union.
It was meant to be experienced together.
So we held hands around a table of thanksgiving for friends and time spent together. Tears gushed as freely as laughter. We talked of the wide world that lay before us, and the memories behind.
Happy Thanksgiving,
anthony forrest
