Spiritual Journey Versus Aesthetic Tourism

When it says that most people don't know what its like to travels through the wilderness with everything you need to survive on your back that really spoke to me.  I have gone true backpacking only once in my life. It was supposed to be a measly 2 mile hike.  However, due to lack of experience and preparation, my friends and I got lost and ended up hiking over 6 miles.  I recall this about killed me as we arrived at the camp site well after sunset.  As intense as my little backpacking adventure was, there was something special about having everything you could possible need right on you back.  It felt freeing compared to my normal sheltered and protected life.  Like I can go anywhere in the world and be totally okay.  It was massively different that the feeling I had when my family and I would go camping at a camp site.  It was nice to get outside, but it let like a shell of an experience compared to true backpacking.  

The comparison of tourism and what the pilgrims did and other previous groups of humans have been doing for years is fascinating.  It got me thinking just how wild it is that we as a collective species will just leave everything behind, travel to another location, live there for a week then come back.  Can you imagine Jesus just taking a vacation to Italy?  applying this idea to ancient times makes it seem so silly but it was thousands of people do every year today. 

"Even landscapes such as the Ramble with New York City’s Central Park, though inspired by and modeled after the wild, still bear the mark of domestication."  -  This quote reminded me a lot of the paper I wrote for assignment #1.  The idea that places that try to mimic nature almost always fall short. It is truly impossible to replicate the perfect randomness true nature provides.  You can't beat it and  you can't recreate it. 

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