Hello to the Vagabond Journey readers. My name is Ann Marie Sparkman Nations, Emery for short, and I’m very happy to be joining the Shepard family in their travels.
I’ve been writing my own special kind of travel blog since September of 2006. Even though I rarely travel outside of the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, I’m constantly following trails, roads and waterways, exploring faraway places in books and movies, learning about different cultures from the people who cross my path.
On April 19, 2009, I found Wade while taking a 15-month road trip adventure. I was Tripping with the Drifters when I found Wade’s favorite Traveller Quotes, posted in January 2006. I felt like I was time tripping for a moment, my mind finding paths that someone else had traveled a few years before. Then I checked to see where he was in the now of April 19, 2009. He was in Aleppo Syria with his pregnant Chaya, and I was suddenly with them.
Our worlds are uniting further as I bring The Reader Travels to VagabondJourney.com. Trip with me.
It is wonderful to be tripping with you Emery. This is a great story. It is seldom when something you write out into the internet bounces off of someone else and then comes back to you full circle. It was great to hear this story, it surely adds to the validity of writing online — it is a way to truly connect paths with people in very random, scattered, kaleidoscopic sort of way.
It is great to be working on this project with you, welcome aboard.
Serendipity is indeed a beautiful thing. Your comments make me think of the message in a bottle set adrift in the ocean, in search of some remote chance at connecting to someone, anyone. Of course, the Internet is a sea of people, so you’re a lot more likely to reach a live one.
I love to look at the search terms that bring people to my site. Of course the most popular search string is still, “Blanche Dubois drag queen,” so I’m not sure if it’s a truly meaningful connection. Again, full circle, back to the “message in a bottle,” which also happens to be the name of a song on an album by The Police entitled, Synchronicity, which is like serendipity or coincidence, but with some deeply connected purpose, and on and on…
Oh, and I do love kaleidoscopes.