We U.S. inhabitants are a restless people. We’ll take 144.5 million pleasure trips during the next three months, according to the Travel Industry Association, down only 4 percent from last spring and early summer. Last year we took a total of about 577.4 million domestic trips alone.

A broader view than the one offered in most colorful travel brochures is expressed by Henry Miller who wrote: “If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.”

In this special section, Len Biallas offers a spirituality of travel, ways of deepening your own inner life and awareness of the sacred in the world through journeys to places near and far. Barbara Allaire spotlights her trip, along with members of her parish in Minnesota, to sites in Mexico, reaching out in solidarity to the everyday people there. Margot Patterson visits an unusual pilgrimage destination in the Czech Republic. Patty McCarty reports on a recent trip to a little town near Ireland’s metropolis, and on the young adults she encountered alongside Dublin Bay.

-- Rich Heffern

National Catholic Reporter, April 12, 2002

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