“Stuff your eyes with wonder. Live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. see the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that . Shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.”

-Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

I stumbled upon this quote recently and stopped on it for a long time. Stuffing your eyes with wonder is one of the best images I have ever equated with travel. In bringing along two preschoolers, one golden retriever and a lot of books and games on our trip, I know that stuffing our eyes full of wonder is exactly why we have decided to take this trip.

The anticipation that I look upon this trip with is sublime. I am nervous-excited-happy-hesitant-giddy-ecstatic-woozy-anxious about what might be one of the best trips I have taken so far in my life. I look at my kids when we are cuddled up for bedtime and say, “do you guys know what a BIG DEAL this is?” I look at my husband (whose crazy idea this was by the way) and can’t believe we are crossing something off our bucket list so early in life.

As we stuff our eyes full of wonder, I hope we meet a lot of new and interesting people, have challenging but ultimately educational experiences, get lost, get found, laugh, take pictures, get dirty, get tired and most of all, develop a deep love and gratefulness of the home we have traveled away from. As we “shake our sloth free,” I hope we learn more about ourselves as people and develop a deeper bond as a family. There’s no guarantees except that we will be together and enjoy the adventure.

I hope that you will follow us on our adventures! It’s going to be an awesome summer!

One of my favorite pictures of the vacation we took to Myrtle Beach, the three of them flying a kite on the beach.