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Ah, travel... Specific inspiration, of course, for the highly fictionalized "travel journals." (Still cracking good fun to end a day of travel trying to force the day's events into a Lovecraft pastiche or Sci-fi tale, and the next time you can take an extended trip I recommend it.)

As I DON'T consider myself "a writer," merely a dilettante who happens to have some potential, I can't get into how travel has inspired specific tales beyond that, other than the observation that anything that expands a writer's knowledge and experience has to inform one's writing. As a more visual artist, there's always the joys of seeing new things - different colors (southern California is brown, Ireland is green, Antarctica is blue, Australia is brown, but a richer, redder brown than the desaturated brown and gray of California), New shapes (the erosion patterns of the American southwest - Arizona, New Mexico - and its solid rock are different from the sand erosion of so Cal, or the transient patterns of ice floes in Antarctica... Images I captured of shapes long gone), whether natural or artificial (anywhere outside So Cal has more interesting architecture - except for LA City Hall and the Downtown Hyatt Regency) are there to inspire. But you know this.

Meeting new people is, of course, always interesting. Hearing people from far away lands discussing where they live expands one's mind.

An interesting thing in travel is how one might influence those one meets. I'm remembering being in Adelaide, Australia, and wandering around taking photos of the interesting buildings. Skyscrapers of blue and green glass with brown and tan tile next to 200-year-old sandstone buildings... I remember being engaged by two older men who started complaining about the "new buildings ruining the charm of the city," and my observations of how the new buildings might have been simpler geometric shapes (cuboids and cylinders, next to pseudo-roman columns and embrasures), but how the blue glass echoed the blue of the ocean while the brown and tan tiles were meant to evoke the sand and stone of the desert. In short, how the new architecture attempted to evoke and compliment the land around it AND the older buildings.

One of the two men looked around for a few moments and decided I was correct, and, now that he thought about it, the new buildings actually were pretty. The other said he could see my point but still preferred the neoclassical/gothic sandstone (fair enough).

So, travel can not only broaden the mind of the traveler, but the traveler's observations can influence the perceptions of the locals. That's kind of neat.

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