Dear Friend,
I’ve often compared traveling to childbirth; when it’s over you can’t imagine ever going through it again! But in no time the trials are forgotten and you are planning the next big adventure. Life is a journey with highs, lows, challenges and rewards. So, here’s to living life to the fullest and enjoying the amazing journey we’re on!
Joanne


Home Again – the music


Home Again – the lyric

Time to go
Somewhere new
I want to see
New places
I just like
To fly away
And stay
In different spaces

And it’s hard to explain
How that urge to get away
Just makes me love, love, love
To get back home again

Home again

Whether you go
Here or there
It’s not so much
The destination
It’s what you do
Along the way
It’s the joy
Of exploration

What delight to savor
All the sights and sounds and flavors
How it makes me love, love, love
To get back home again

As I roam
This amazing globe
It reminds me, reminds me again
It’s a great big wide
Wonderful world
And there’s just no place like home

Sweet home

Got to get back home again.

© 2013 Joanne Jolee, Pinnacle American Records, LLC (BMI)

iTunesx25


joanne-jolee-Balboa-Park-2-web-580x450


Travel – Siena

Feeling quite adventurous my husband and I decided to drive from Milan to Siena. After hours of great frustration, we arrived at this sign….which way would you go!

siena-siena-580x435

We finally arrived and the hotel concierge, who didn’t speak a word of English, drew us this map with his directions…
centro-directions-580x550

“I can’t think of anything that  excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.”
Bill Bryson “Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe”

joanne-jolee-Balboa-Park-3-web-580x450


Travel – a poem about the journey of life

“Live so tomorrow finds us farther than today”

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world’s broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,— act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1888)


 

Travel – when the journey gets difficult

“This hill, though high, I covet to ascend;
The difficulty will not me offend.
For I perceive the way to life lies here.
Come, pluck up, heart; let’s neither faint nor fear.
Better, though difficult, the right way to go,
Than wrong, though easy, where the end is woe.”
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress

 


joanne-jolee-Balboa-Park-1-web-580x450