Rounding the corner from Holiday Avenue onto New Year Street, I could swear I heard a collective sigh of relief. Preparing for family celebrations, decorating your home, not to mention shopping and gift wrapping can be stressful and exhausting. I’ve always enjoyed emerging from the lights and bustle into the quietness of a month in mid-winter. I’ll admit that the coldest season is not my favorite, but it does offer certain perks. While engaged in a writing marathon for The Forever Sky, the fourth and final book in Montana Gold western romance series, I appreciate the chance to dig in with fewer distractions.

There’s something meditative about winter. Perhaps it’s that we’re driven inside for warmth and nurture. It might be the shorter days and darker nights. Rain lashing the windows and wind howling across the landscape prompt us to hunker down in safety. I’ve always found storms exhilarating but also slightly alarming. Recently that frisson of fear was proved out when a tree in our yard fell. It landed on the neighbor’s fence. I’m grateful it didn’t fall the other way and take out my deck, but we did deal with an insurance claim. We also, happily, met our neighbor.

Our upcoming travel plans, to keep this post mainly on-topic, include a springtime junket to Vancouver Island. I’ve long wanted to visit Victoria’s Butchart Gardens, which if you didn’t know is world-famous. Until a few years ago, all you had to do to cross the border was to show your driver’s license. That’s no longer true. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a passport. The years I spent traveling overseas seem distant. The lessons I learned don’t. Funny how feeling lost and confused carves itself into your memory.

I pulled from my experiences of overseas travel in writing Stagecoach to Liberty. In that story, the heroine travels to America from her native Germany. She immediately finds herself in peril and struggles to survive as a stranger in a foreign land.

My family is already thinking ahead several years to when we’ll travel overseas together. Now is the time to brainstorm and dream. We were already planning to visit Ireland, Scotland, Cornwall, and England, but then my husband suggested Germany and my daughter wants to see Greece. Our six months in the UK seems to be ballooning. I don’t have book projects to research in those other countries, and the idea of straying so much farther from home seems a bit alarming.

I’ve had to remind myself that the unknown is always part of the mix when you travel. Whether you take it as an adventure or shrink in fear depends largely on your attitude.

When I was small, my father would pretend to be lost on family car trips. At intersections, he asked his children which way to turn. My brother and I would happily shout directions. Sometimes he took our advice, and other times he swung the wheel the other way. It wasn’t until I was grown that I realized we’d never been lost at all. Believing we were taught me to look for opportunities in the unknown. It instilled a sense of adventure in me, for which I’ll always be grateful. That doesn’t mean that the unknown doesn’t scare me, but that’s when I recall the lessons I learned during those long-ago road trips.

What about you? Are you facing an ‘unknown’ in your own life?