A Joyous Return to Work Travel

To spark imagination, we need the newness of other places

I’m on my final flight home after a reporting trip to Mississippi.

Relying on the closest airport to my reporting destination there left me crisscrossing on a flat, northern Alabama state route, with nothing but a single turn after an hour spent alone in a clean rental car, skipping between various signals for the same handful of country and “Today’s Hits!” radio stations.

There’s a vast openness to the drive here, the trip itself organized with large gaps on my calendar reserved for hunting down documents or trying to get so-and-so to talk to me.

I was never a frequent business traveler. For me, those early years of freelance writing were a means of making myself available to small children, bending my working life around my family. So, this venture states away, on my own after so much time closed off, had the mingled feel of adventure and wild escape.

The Life-Changing Magic of Having a Second Place to Go

I spent five days, often on my own, trying to make sense of two states I’d never…