Blog Archive

¡Bienvenidos!

Hello! I’m Alison and this is my travel blog, kept to chronicle adventures and experiences for myself, for family, and for friends. If you are not of one of the aforementioned categories, welcome regardless! I’m an American who has had the great fortune to travel for study, work, and fun, and I have been writing (however sporadically) since 2007. I am a prodigious procrastinator, so I'll only write a post every few months. I've been traveling to gain work experience, but am picking up general life experience along the way, of course! I love to tell stories and take photos. I studied abroad in Morocco, Egypt and Israel in 2007-2008, I spent 2009-2010, working as an English teacher in Isla Mujeres, Mexico, and I moved to Thailand in August 2010, where I lived along the Burmese border training a local health department in skills such as computer literacy and public health fundamentals. I left Thailand in November 2011, and I will spend the spring of 2012 in Colombia, working as a field assistant on a malaria ecology project. Stay tuned for future travels...

The blog title is inspired by my favorite poem, "Ulysses," by Tennyson. Selected snippets below:

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vexed the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
...
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch where thro'
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!

As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this grey spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
...
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.