Open Road

Tolkein's road went ever on and on. Mine today (and today's blip) seemed to go ever up and up. But it was fun, and I got to use the gears - including 4WDLow, which was amazing and took me up a wall of mud with no effort whatsoever. Heady stuff. And I did get back down again eventually, if not by the route I had planned.

Good to be in the open country again, and Patagonia sure is full of wide open spaces. being one of the wildest places on earth although not so much the part where I live. To account for their impressions of this 'windswept wilderness' Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux wrote that Nowhere is a Place. You have to be here to see that.

Many other writers have been similarly affected; in no particular order, we might mention Magellan, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Darwin, W. H. Hudson, Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville. Good company for a wannabe writer like me.