Good Wednesday morning Life Scribers! If you’re just joining us, we started our journey into telling travel stories on our pages last week. You can catch up by reading the first post here. This week we’re going to talk about the unexpected.

What Surprised You?

One of the best things about traveling is that we often discover things we didn’t know of along the line. This past spring, we took a family road trip out west. My husband had some work to do in Arizona for a couple of days, and we decided we could roll that into a vacation for the whole gang, and ended up going all the way to the Pacific. All of my trips to California and to Washington have been by plane, so this was the first time I was able to see many of the states in between Michigan and the west coast. I was incredibly surprised and delighted by some of the stuff we discovered on that road trip. I was shocked to see that northern Arizona is rather reminiscent of parts of northern Michigan. Patches of snow on the ground, beautiful green forests and quaint little cabins—things I never thought I’d find in a state that I associated with the desert. I was also utterly flabbergasted by the sheer beauty of Utah. The landscape is so completely different from what I’m used to as a Midwesterner and it just astounded me.

Consider scrapping pages not just about what you did and where you went, but also about the things that surprised you in your travels. Did you discover anything that was unexpected? How did your trip become more than you planned? I find that these hidden gems are my favorite when reminiscing about travel. Scrap them so that others can relive that experience with you.

Next week we’ll be back to take a look at the comical side of traveling. Until then, keep on storytelling!