I’m heading out of town for a girls’ weekend, crossing over Afton Mountain from the Shenandoah Valley into the Rockfish Valley. My destination: Smith Mountain Lake.

But let’s rewind from the beautiful to the mundane.

On my way, I start to think about travel.

My trip starts, as all trips in my neck of the woods tend to do, on the interstate. There’s always construction on this stretch of highway, stop-and-go traffic the norm.

During one of many stops today, I notice a farm trailer ahead of me. Again, not unusual where I’m from. In the back ride two horses, noses to the wind, manes trailing behind them. They’re passengers this morning, though once they were the only transportation from here to there. Now, they’re carried by a diesel engine over the same fields their ancestors once crossed on foot.

I think about all the ways we move: My daughter a week ago, waiting for the 7 PM train to Philadelphia, toes curled inside her sneakers, phone in her hand, backpack slung over one shoulder. She’s ready for the world to open up.

I’m not quite ready to release her into it.

Overhead, contrails score the sky, white stitches sewn by people flying to destinations I’ll never see. I watch them through the windshield, wondering where they’re going and what waits for them there. I hope it’s happy.

As for me, I’m still most at home with the old roads, where the valleys curl around the mountains before the roads finally straighten. I like to travel at ground level, where you can see the wild phlox on the verge and feel the hills rising beneath your tires.

I write to understand where I’ve been, and where I’m headed. The blank page is its own highway, with detours, rest stops, and unexpected companions. Sometimes it’s as slow as a horse trailer stuttering on a congested interstate; sometimes it’s a flight of imagination that leaves contrails across a blue morning.

Travel is part habit, part discovery—like writing. Sometimes I retrace old routes, moving on muscle memory alone; other times, I take the long way, just to see something new. In both travel and fiction, the landscape shifts every time, depending on what you’re carrying—and who’s with you.

No matter how far I go—by car, by train, or by memory—I find myself circling back to the valley. Maybe that’s the heart of writing for me: leaving, so I can return with something new to say.

Every journey has its own rhythm. Sometimes, what matters most isn’t how far you go, but how closely you watch the world as you pass through.

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