Travel

Travel

The last two weeks have not been productive for writing. Ingrid and I have been hiking through the Swiss alps and I haven’t had the time or energy to work at a book or even a blog. This has been a wonderful, if challenging trip; eleven days of trekking one hundred and fifty kilometers through the Swiss mountains and climbing as much as a kilometer each day.

Although travel can interrupt the normal patten of writing, I think getting away from our normal life is important. When we move to different parts of the world, we are exposed to unfamiliar ways of living. New approaches to eating, speaking, and interacting with others can give us new ideas.

For a writer it’s important to be open to seeing the world with new eyes and there are few better ways to open our minds than through travel.

Travel can provide us with ideas for stories. The adventures and misadventures we experience can be fodder for our writing. I now know what the quaint villages high in the Swiss alps look like and how the people there interact and what they eat. My experience climbing the intimidating ladders that run up the side of a vertical rock face to the Pas de Chevre may make its way into a future book. Some day one of my characters may get to taste the amazing cheeses we sampled in Switzerland.

Another resource travel provides is the people encountered along the way. A perceptive author is constantly watching for inspiration for characters to use in a book.

We encountered a family of Americans hiking the iconic Haute Route through the alps. Because one of the two sons was studying in Paris, they decided this was an opportunity for an adventure together. Our group ran into them numerous times during our hike. They always seemed just a little slower than us and a bit offended by our presence.

The mother was a thin, hard looking woman who had previously cycled across America. The two sons were alternatively bored or fed up with how slow their parents were. Incredibly, the father had a hip replaced two months before the trip. He seemed disgusted with how his surgery was slowing down his progress. I can’t imagine how he got insurance for this challenging trip, but I’d love to use the family in a story.

Our own group was fascinating. Besides Ingrid and I, there were two American women, an Australian man, and a French guide from Chamonix.

We got on fabulously but like humans all over the planet, they were fascinating.

Our new Australian friend introduced himself to everyone we met with “hello, I’m Paul from Australia, your new best friend”. He was one of the most amusing people I’ve ever met. There wasn’t a moment on the trip when Paul wasn’t in overdrive. Whether he was teasing our guide or helping a waitress take the dishes into a restaurant kitchen, he was always on. It’s been my experience that no international trip is complete without a funny Australian.

The girls from the States were best friends for the decades since they’d been in university.

Melissa was a recently retired nurse who was an adventurer since childhood when she figured how to escape home on her older sister’s bike by hitting the pedals at the top of their rotation. Amy was quieter and a follower of rules. They made a classic pair of friends who were simultaneously alike and polar opposites. I hope none of them mind if they end up in a book.

Travel opens the world to all of us. The only difference with writers is that we grab our experiences and hold them until there is a place for them in our writing.