How to write a travel blog when adventures are on pause

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower” wrote William Blake, long before the COVID-19 pandemic forced travel-lovers home and put their adventures on pause. Amongst all the other unanswered questions is: How do I continue to write a travel blog in this smaller new world of isolation, closures and cancellations?

I believe the answer lies with Blake.

In his poem “Auguries of Innocence,” published in 1863, he urged us to look closely at what’s around us, and not dismiss it because of size or familiarity. Grains of sand or wildflowers, when examined closely, yield worlds and heavens of their own. To unlock these riches, we simply must have the right mindset to want to examine these small worlds. If we approach our surroundings, no matter how restricted or small, with curiosity and a sense of wonder, we can find the same beauty and awe as in a foreign land.

Blake, of course, was introducing his thesis that the loss of innocence leads to evil, corruption and the downfall of the world, and there may be parallels there with COVID too. But I interpreted those opening lines as my challenge – to find exciting stories in my small surroundings, the hyperlocal as it were. The scope is even more microscopic than a staycation, where you stay home and be a tourist in your own town, because museums, theatres, restaurants, and anything else we might want to see or do are closed.

It took me the whole of our 14-day isolation period, since returning from Argentina, to decipher this challenge and plot how to proceed with my blog. For the first few days, we were still in the clutches of excess cortisol, exhausted physically and mentally as we recovered from the stress of quarantine in Buenos Aires, our cancelled flight, and finally flying home to Canada. Relief at being home also came with body aches, no energy, worry about finances, and disappointment at the way our adventures ended. We slumped like used balloons.

But then the sun came out and our let-down feelings began to disappear with the snow. We “visited” with friends and family via Skype, Messenger, Zoom and a few driveway six-feet-apart conversations. The signs of spring rose around us: squonking geese, hopping robins, daffodil shoots poking through the ground, and longer days.

Truly, we have no right to complain about our situation, since there are so many who are much worse off than we are. Our disappointment at having our travels cut short comes from a place of privilege. My stern lecture to myself to smarten up began to take effect. Slowly a more positive mindset made its way into thoughts about what we’ll do for the next undetermined length of time.

We are hardly the first and won’t be the last to have travel plans curtailed by widespread sickness. I’m reading Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, which recounts his travels in 1867 through Europe and the Holy Land aboard a retired Civil War ship. In Naples and Athens, the ship was not permitted to dock due to unspecified illness (although cholera was the most-feared epidemic at the time).

“The ship is lying here in the harbor of Naples – quarantined. She has been here several days and will remain several more,” Twain wrote. And in Athens: “But bad news came. The commandant of the Piraeus [Athens’ port] came in his boat, and said we must either depart or else get outside the harbor and remain imprisoned in our ship, under rigid quarantine, for eleven days! So we took up the anchor and moved outside, to lie a dozen hours or so, taking in supplies, and then sail for Constantinople. It was the bitterest disappointment we had yet experienced.”

However, before the ship sailed from Piraeus, Twain and three others stole ashore in a small boat, avoided the guards enforcing the quarantine, and walked 21 kilometres to climb the Acropolis and explore by moonlight. They made it back to the ship without being fined or imprisoned.

I stumbled across two unlikely sources of inspiration, although only one was successful.

Twain did not inspire me, but another unlikely source did. We were watching the Tomb Raider movie with Angelina Jolie, and she receives a clue from her father: that first verse of the Blake poem. I sat up straight and immediately Googled the whole poem. New energy began to flow as I realized how it could guide my blog writing. I finally felt like researching the possibilities and making plans.

In our travels so far, we’ve experienced way more than I’ve had time to write about. Many stories either haven’t been written or involved summarizing. Now that we’re on pause, I’ll have time to fill in some of those gaps, as we ponder our memories as well as the sights, sounds, feel, smells and tastes of the adventures we’ve already had.

And going forward, we’ll take a deep dive into the local, searching for the magic in flowers and grains of sand so that we might “Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour.”  

One of our travel goals had been to achieve a more relaxed attitude towards life, to take each day as it came. Who knew it would become this laissez faire?

As Marcel Proust said, we must learn how to see things with new eyes.

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”