Trips, treks, travel and The Earth #AtoZChallenge

For about 20 days you've heard so many stories, you've come with me on a journey that has actually changed me more than 20 something years put together have, participating in the blogging challenge has only furthered that experience. I would like to spare a few minutes to thank everyone who took me on their own alphabetical journey and took me to corners of their mind that are private and so personal.

Speaking of journeys, I must tell you about the journeys I took. It was magical and wonderful. The 4 state trip we took sometime in July still feels like it was straight out dream. From Nevada to Arizona, Utah and then California. So many sights, so many people and so much beauty. I get the chills simply by thinking of that one week. When we planned the trip, we had a little bit of clue about the places to see, we wanted to do the offbeat tour.

It's good that me and the boy share almost similar views on places to see, can't imagine the hell we'd be in if we disagreed on where to vacation. We hate crowds, we like solitude, we actively seek out the unpopular, with this brief in mind, we searched. Now, while Erie was treating us to a great summer in the low 20's, the places we were planning of weren't pleasant. Vegas was a good 45 degrees of pure heat.  We wen't to the Hoover dam! We saw the Arches National Park, Monument Valley, saw the Grand Canyon and Death Valley. I'm not going to describe them to you, because my vocabulary is too limited to describe what I saw. I'll put up pictures though.

What I saw was incredible. I saw the Earth literally in all its glorious layers, millions of years right in front of my eyes. How can I describe that feeling of complete lack of self as I stood in front of the Grand Canyon and thought about how inconsequential all my actions were. I cannot find the words to tell you about the emotions that I was going through as I sat there in a cafe and looked out at Monument Valley, tracing hundreds of years of lives of the tribes that prayed in these glorious lands, I don't think I can even fathom to describe how the slightest of breeze that blew my hair while looking at the Arches in Utah was the same force that over the last million years carved these structures.

We are absolutely minuscule. Our lives are insignificant at best. The earth in all her glory is formidable.  Everything we are, everything we know, we are because of her. It is very difficult to also shake of that feeling of utter guilt, the idea that we do not respect the earth enough. We ignore our environment. We push our boundaries almost constantly, and that we as a species are single handedly destroying the earth and her many cultures.

This could not have come at a more appropriate time. As I write this, I realised it is Earth day. The day we first saw the earth from the outside.  We deserve to treat earth and all her citizens much much better than we are.

That's the Husband's pictures!