Less than 12 hours after I took this photo, I was gone, flying back across the ocean.

I went with two natural scientists (an ecologist and a marine biologist) out to go see the mountains and the sea outside Barcelona. The chapel where we stopped for lunch was a quaint, beautiful building from the 10th century, the door open and inviting, no one around. (Well, no one around who wasn’t scared off by the punks picnicing!) We hiked up into the hills and then got lost driving to the coast on backcountry highways.

I need to stop comparing places. Catalonia isn’t more beautiful than the US. The US isn’t more beautiful than Catalonia. They’re different, each place different with its own majesty. And this is why I can’t stay still, why I may never stay still. There is so much world to see and to fall in love with, and when you fall in love with a place, you can’t leave it forever, which means you can’t truly set down roots anywhere else.

Barring catastrophe like the apocalypse, death, imprisonment, or me settling down, I will return to Catalonia.