I'm off on an adventure. Alone. For four days and four nights.
Thanks to the enormous generosity of always-supportive LOML, I'll be driving down the east coast of NSW, then across to Daylesford in Victoria and back up to Sydney via Bendigo. It's a big drive and it may change en-route, but to be honest, it doesn't matter where I go, just that I go. Alone.
There have been two schools of opinion on this one. First there is the 'oh my god, I'm so jealous, I wish I was doing that' school. They get that it's not about the drive. It's about the opportunity to do what I want, when I want and for as long as I want. If you ask me, when you're a wife and a mumma and at the end of some days you've done so much talking in your work and real life that you are literally all talked out, being alone is the ultimate luxury.
Then there's the 'don't you want to take a friend?' school.
Now, I'm a social creature, don't get me wrong. I come alive in large groups of people and I love to talk and talk and talk. Love sharing a story, having a cuddle, showing off, listening to a problem, debating the universe and sorting out just exactly what needs to be done about that Shari-Lea.
But I really, really don't want to take a friend.
Cheers to thinking uninterrupted thoughts and spur of the moment stop offs. To arrivals and departures whenever it suits me. To suddenly taking a left hand turn to see what's down the road. To listening to the music that I want to listen to or to no music at all. To staying a bit too long at a gallery or lingering in a bookstore.
Cheers to the beauty of solitude.
[Image: photo-alchemy.co.uk]