“There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it.”

- Charles Dudley Warner

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.”

- Henry Miller

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”

- St. Augustine

“A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.”

- Lao Tzu

“Not all those who wander are lost.”

- J. R. R. Tolkien

"Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things - air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.”

- Cesare Pavese

“A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.”

- Tim Cahill

“Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.”

- Miriam Beard

“To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.”

- Bill Bryson

“Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.”

- Maya Angelou

“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”

- Martin Buber

“What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do - especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.”

- William Least Heat Moon

“Adventure is a path. Real adventure - self-determined, self-motivated, often risky - forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind - and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.”

- Mark Jenkins

“Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.”

- Freya Stark

“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”

- Robert Louis Stevenson

“Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.”

- Anatole France

“We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.”

- Jawaharial Nehru

“Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.”

- Pat Conroy

“To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.”

- Freya Stark

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

- Mark Twain

* Postscript

All of these were taken around the Melchor Island of the Tres Reyes (Three Kings) Island Group in Marinduque.

I was inspired to do this because tomorrow marks my first year here in tabblo. The journey I've shared here with you has been nothing less than spectacular. Thank you for my wonderful first year here--you made me feel very welcome and my photos have been deeply appreciated. Most importantly, thank you for the gift of friendship--especially to those who do send me messages of concern and even (especially!) those nonsense and gossipy whatnots. *wink* I feel very grateful.

Thank you, tabblo and the tabblo community.

Here's to more years of celebrating the beauty of the world! :) Cheers! And let's all travel together in this odyssey called LIFE.

- James