One of the things I love most about Bram Stoker's famed vampire story is the beginning, because it starts with a journey. Young clerk Harker, honest and stuffy and not entirely ready to give himself over to wonder, is first thrust into a greater and more terrifying world by the simple expedient of...travel.
Harker's journey, a curious travelogue of increasing discomfort with ever more alien surroundings, is transformative in some rather important ways. The most interesting of them for my purpose here is this: Harker is necessarily forced, in his encounter with an Otherness that is at once utterly alien and disturbingly intimate, to confront himself, and he must change because of it.
This is just what getting out and about in the world is FOR, really -- to change and be changed by the world. At least, that's what I want from this trip, following so closely on Harker's fictional heels!
I do hope our trip doesn't involve being held captive in a remote castle while being molested by the undead, though. I draw the line at certain forms of transformation.
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