There’s an old mirror hanging in my bedroom, the kind with spots along the edges where the silvering has worn thin. Most mornings I give it the quick glance, straighten my collar, check for something in my teeth, and head out the door. That kind of look gets you through the day fine. It never healed a man yet.
The deeper look is a different matter entirely. That’s the one where you stand still long enough for the light to find every corner, every wound you’ve been covering with a smile, every old habit that’s still got a grip on your collar like a debt collector who knows your address. It takes nerve to hold your own gaze that long. Most of us would rather talk about the weather, or the boss, or the people who did us wrong, anything but stand there and admit, this one’s mine, and it’s still bleeding some.
Where Old Habits Still Have a Grip
It is easier to blame circumstances. Easier to excuse the choices we made in the dark and call them survival. Easier still to hide the pain beneath a smile so practiced nobody thinks to ask if you’re all right.
But here’s the hard truth, plain as a nail through a board. We cannot heal what we refuse to acknowledge. We cannot change what we keep telling ourselves does not exist. A wound left unnamed just festers quiet, and it will collect its due one way or another, on its own schedule, not yours.
The Light That Heals Instead of Shames
Ephesians 4:22 through 24 lays it out plain. Put away the old self, corrupted by deceitful desires. Be renewed in the spirit of your mind. Put on the new self, created after God in righteousness and true holiness.
That is not a courtroom verse. It is not God dragging you into the light to humiliate you in front of the neighbors. It is a good father checking a wound so he can clean it right and let it close the way it ought to. He does not shame the broken. He tends to them.
One Honest Prayer Is Enough to Start
You do not have to fix the whole man tonight. Nobody’s asking you to repair forty years of habit before breakfast. Just start where you are, with one honest prayer, spoken plain.
Lord, show me what needs to change, and give me the courage to follow where You lead.
The person in that mirror still carries yesterday’s scars. Grace does not erase them. It just means he is no longer chained to the man who earned them.
Face the truth. Release the old. Renew your mind. Then take the next faithful step toward the person God is still shaping you to become.
There’s a stretch of highway I used to drive before sunup. I would see nothing but gray shapes and guesswork, mile markers swallowed whole by the dark.
You’d swear the road had disappeared. Then, so slow you almost missed it, a thin line of light would crack open the horizon. Not a flood. Not a flash. Just enough to see the next hundred yards.
Then I’d top a hill and there would be town. I was at my destination.
That’s the only kind of light God’s ever promised me.
I wanted the whole map once. Every turn, every mile laid out before I took the first step was what I wanted before starting my journey.
Took me a long while to understand that’s not how grace travels. It comes the way dawn comes: a little more light for the little more road you can see.
One prayer. One choice. One stubborn act of trust before the coffee’s even cooled.
Proverbs 4:18 says it plain, the path of the righteous is like the morning sun, shining ever brighter till the full light of day.
So if your beginning looks thin right now. Maybe it looks like a blank page, a quiet prayer, a faith you’re not sure will hold your weight. Don’t you dare despise it. Sunrise never apologizes for starting slow.
Look back five years, ten. You’ll find the dark doesn’t sit on you the way it used to. You haven’t arrived. But friend, you are not where you started.
Keep walking or driving forward. The light’s already coming.
Lord, when the road looks dim, help me trust the light You’ve already given, and walk it faithful, one step at a time. Amen.
That is when Deuteronomy 31:8 becomes more than a verse to underline. It becomes a handrail for the heart:
“The Lord himself goes before you and will be with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you.”
Before you arrive at the doctor’s office, He is already there.
Before you face the hard conversation, He has already gone ahead.
Before the bill comes due, before the grief rises up, before the loneliness knocks on the door, before the news you did not want to hear finds its way into your day — the Lord is not surprised, delayed, distracted, or absent.
He goes before you.
That means the unknown is not unknown to Him.
And He will be with you.
That means you are not walking into tomorrow by yourself.
Fear tells us we are alone. Discouragement tells us nothing will change. Faith reminds us that God has already stepped into the place we are afraid to enter.
So today, take the next step. Not because you know how everything will work out, but because you know Who is already ahead of you.
Do not be afraid.
Do not be discouraged.
The road may be uncertain, but the One who walks before you is faithful.
The year was 1967, and I was just a kid in a Schertz, Texas high school when a teacher I didn’t even think much of at the time cracked something open in me that never quite closed back up.
Back then, English class wasn’t for reading poems quiet at your desk. You memorized them. Then you stood up in front of God and everybody and recited them, and every forgotten word felt like a small dying right there in front of your friends.
We were told to pick a poem, minimum ten or twelve lines. I don’t rightly recall which. Most kids picked something short and safe, something they could carry without breaking a sweat.
Not me. My choice was “The Barefoot Boy,” by John Greenleaf Whittier. The poem was better than a hundred lines, wall to wall. I’d first heard it a year before, up in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, from an eighth-grade teacher who read it like it mattered, and something in me latched onto it and never quite let go. The structure pulled me in. I loved the way it moved down the page like a boy actually walking, the story underneath it, barefoot and unbothered and free.
When she called my name, I walked to the front of the room and did something none of my classmates had thought to do. I gave my own introduction first, written and memorized same as the poem, laying out what the thing meant and why it mattered.
Then I let it go.
I wasn’t interested in just saying the words right. I wanted them breathing. My voice became an instrument. I focused on pace, pitch, silence, and I moved around the front of that classroom more like a preacher working a Sunday crowd than a high school boy trying to pass English, arms doing half the talking. I wanted that poem alive in the room the same way it had come alive in me. My dream was that everyone would feel the words like I felt them.
When I finished, the quiet didn’t last. The teacher was on her feet clapping. My classmates joined her, and a couple of the boys let out one of those low whistles teenage boys save for the things they’d never admit moved them.
That teacher didn’t ask me to join the University Interscholastic League poetry team, she told me I was joining, plain and simple. She said she’d never heard a student read poetry with that kind of fire and control, and she pushed me toward more of it. She had me doing more reading, more writing, more standing up and saying true things out loud.
Nearly sixty years gone now, and I still carry that afternoon like a coin in my pocket. I still remember the prettiest girl in the class coming over and hugging me and whispering in my ear, “You sure talk pretty. I’d love to have you read more poetry just to me.”
Sometimes a teacher spots something in a kid before the kid even knows it’s there. Sometimes it’s a poem, or an assignment nobody wanted, or a burst of applause nobody saw coming, swinging open a door that was shut a moment before. A sign pointing in a direction to a destination never before considered.
Scripture says it plain, in Psalm 45:1, “My heart is stirred by a noble theme as I recite my verses for the king; my tongue is the pen of a skillful writer.” My English teacher quoted that verse to me saying memorizing verse (poetry) is a noble calling.
That old line from a Psalm in the Bible is a gift running both directions. One direction to the one who writes and the other direction to the one who reads, to the poet and the one telling the story, to whoever puts the words down and whoever’s brave enough to stand up and give them breath.
So here’s what I’d leave you with today.
Your creativity isn’t an accident. You’re a vessel, and what you write might end up part of a story bigger than you’ll ever see. Writing isn’t just spilling thoughts across a page; it’s shaping, it’s rhythm and cadence, it’s care taken on purpose. Whatever you’re putting down. Whether it be a poem, an essay, a devotional, a letter, a Bible study, or just some words on social media, do it like it matters.
Let your words carry light. May they hand out grace along the way. And let them land on somebody who’s still carrying them sixty years from now.
A selfie taken in Sydney Harbor in November 2023 about 6 AM.
There are cities you visit, and there are cities that receive you.
Sydney is the second kind.
Most places just stand there and let you look at them. Sydney does something different. She opens the door wide, steps back, and waits — patient as a good host who already knows you are going to like it here, and has enough grace not to say so out loud.
Came in by Sea
That is still the best way to arrive anywhere, if the world still permits it — and more and more, it doesn’t. But this time it did. Four weeks aboard the Majestic Princess, all the way from Los Angeles. Hawaii first, then Tahiti, then Mo’orea Island rising up from the Pacific like a cathedral nobody planned and everybody needed. American Samoa after that, then New Zealand, and then the long blue haul across the Tasman Sea, heading west toward a continent.
You cross that much open water, you start to understand why the old sailors talked the way they did. The ocean has a way of reducing a man to his essentials. Strip away the noise, the schedule, the small urgencies that seem large back home — and what you have left is just a person, and the water, and whatever he has been carrying that he hasn’t yet put down.
Somewhere between American Samoa and New Zealand, Tropical Cyclone Lola decided to make herself known. She became the strongest off-season cyclone in Southern Hemisphere history — a Category Five, sustained winds better than 130 miles an hour, with gusts lasting ten minutes hitting 185. Covered the storm for New Zealand news from the deck of that ship. And I will tell you this: numbers like those stop being abstract real fast when you are standing on water and the horizon has gone the color of a bruise.
The ship handled it. The crew handled it. And eventually, Lola moved on — the way storms do, the way hard seasons do, if you hold on long enough and don’t let the fear talk you into something foolish.
By the time Sydney appeared on the horizon, every weary bone in this body was ready for grace.
Grace is exactly what she offered.
Coming through the heads into Sydney Harbour, you begin to understand why people have been writing about this arrival for two centuries and still haven’t gotten it entirely right.
The water goes blue-green and generous. The city rises along the shore in layers — buildings, hills, bridges, bays folding into bays. And then, before you have had time to prepare yourself or set your face into the expression of a man who is not easily impressed —
The Opera House is just there.
The Sydney Opera House taken by Jimmie Aaron Kepler from one of the Sydney Harbour ferries.
Those white sail-forms lifting against the sky like something caught halfway between architecture and music. Like somebody asked a serious question and the building itself was the answer.
You think you know the Opera House. You have seen it ten thousand times — in photographs, on television, in the background of every New Year’s broadcast Sydney has ever hosted. You have seen it so many times you figured familiarity had done its work on you. Processed it. Filed it away.
It has not.
Not until you stand there. Not until a ferry slides past in front of it and the whole scene comes alive — water, motion, sky, those white curves catching the morning light — not until then do you understand that some things have to be witnessed. A photograph is a postcard. The real thing is a conversation.
Standing at that rail, a little road-worn, a little storm-worn, watching the light move across those sails — something in the chest went quiet. Not sad-quiet. The other kind. The kind that comes when you finally arrive somewhere after a long journey and your body recognizes it before your mind catches up.
The Sydney Harbour Bridge with the Sydney Opera House and downtown Sydney skyline in the background taken from a ferry by Jimmie Aaron Kepler.
And beside it all, the Harbour Bridge — dark and strong and honest, the way good infrastructure always is. The way certain people are: not asking to be admired, just doing what they came here to do. If the Opera House is Sydney’s voice, the bridge is her spine. Morning light softens it. Evening turns it to silhouette. It has been standing there since 1932, and it will be standing there long after the rest of us have moved along.
Stayed seven days in a hotel overlooking Sydney Harbour.
The Majestic Princess leaving Sydney Harbor as viewed from the Four Seasons Hotel. Also in the picture is the Sydney Opera House.
Seven days is not enough to know Sydney. Let me say that plainly and early, so you don’t make the same miscalculation. Seven days is enough to begin a friendship. But a good beginning is its own kind of gift, and Sydney gave me that freely and without condition.
Harbor light is its own thing — and I had forgotten that. Or maybe never fully learned it until now. It is not just sunlight on water. It is that restless, shimmering brightness that belongs to cities wise enough to build themselves beside the sea. Every morning it came in silver first, then gold, then full day spilling across boats and bridges and glass. The view changed by the hour. Looked out at a different painting every time.
Some mornings I just sat with my coffee and let it happen.
One morning I boarded the ferry to Manly Beach, and that ride alone was worth the price of the whole trip — which is saying something, because the trip was not cheap and the cyclone was not comfortable.
The ferry pulls away from Circular Quay with the Opera House on your left and the bridge standing tall behind you, and Sydney opens up from the water in a way you cannot see from any sidewalk or taxi window. You have to be on the water. That is the only angle that tells the whole truth.
The locals sat calmly with their coffee and their phones, because this was Tuesday for them. Just the commute. The ordinary machinery of an ordinary morning.
But I stood at the rail like a man who understood he was being given something — and tried to receive it with enough humility to deserve it.
Manly Beach has a barefoot ease about it. Less hurried than the city, more salt-aired and open-handed. Walked from the ferry wharf toward the ocean past cafés and surf shops and families from half a dozen countries, all of them drawn to the same coast for their own reasons. The waves came in steady and confident, the way waves do when they have crossed a long way to get there and arrived without apology.
Manly Beach is an iconic coastal destination located on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, about 11 miles northeast of the Sydney CBD. Renowned for its golden sands, Norfolk pine-lined promenade, and world-class surfing, it offers a relaxed, laid-back vibe compared to more bustling spots like Bondi Beach. Taken by Jimmie Aaron Kepler. We’re looking east out onto the Tasman Sea.
Ate. Wandered. Watched surfers read the water the way good readers read a page — looking for the line, feeling the rhythm, waiting for the right moment to commit. Let the afternoon do what good afternoons do: convince you that most of your worries were smaller than you had made them.
By the time the ferry carried me back, the harbor light had gone soft and golden, and Sydney looked like a painting somebody had earned the right to paint.
Circular Quay might be the finest front porch any city has ever built for itself.
Ferries coming and going. Street performers working for coins and honest smiles. Travelers spinning in slow circles, trying to frame what the eye can barely hold. Up one way, the Opera House. Up the other, the bridge. And out across the water, the harbor moving and glittering like it has never once considered standing still.
The photo was taken in “The Rocks” area of Sydney. Yes, I found a Starbucks in Australia. Photo taken by Jimmie Aaron Kepler November 2023.
The Rocks neighborhood, just a short walk west of the quay, gives you Sydney with her sleeves rolled up. Old stone. Narrow lanes. Buildings that remember sailors and convicts and merchants and dreamers who came looking for a shore that would take them in. Every city has its polished brochure version, and every city has the older story underneath it — the one told in weathered steps and half-forgotten names and the kind of silence that settles into stone over a long time.
The Rocks carries that story in its bones.
Royal Botanical Gardens, Sydney New South Wales taken by Jimmie Aaron Kepler November 2023.
The Royal Botanic Garden sits right beside the harbour, and one full morning I walked it slow — the way gardens ask you to walk them, which is slower than most of us are inclined to go. Paths curved through palms and flowering beds and old trees throwing good shade. From certain spots, the Opera House appeared through the branches like a white-sailed ship caught between land and sky.
After four weeks aboard the Majestic Princess, after Lola’s fury and the long rolling miles of open water, that view said something that didn’t require translation. Sometimes a place speaks directly to wherever you have been carrying things, and you don’t need words for it. You just need to stand still and listen.
The Queen Victoria Building in the heart of the shopping district was another kind of surprise. A grand Victorian arcade — graceful arches, tiled floors, light pouring down through the glass ceiling, shops arranged on multiple levels around a space too beautiful for ordinary commerce. Walked through it slowly, because some buildings deserve the time it takes to look at them properly. Saw a royal proclamation by Queen Elizabeth. Also a McDonald’s. History and french fries, standing in the same building, which is about as honest a summary of the modern world as anything I can offer.
Inside Victoria Station shopping mall in Sydney taken by Jimmie Aaron Kepler November 2023.
Sydney’s hills kept me honest. Some of those sidewalks climb like they have a personal opinion about tourists. But the hills give the city its shape, make each walk feel earned, and hand you views around corners you would have missed in a flatter place.
Several evenings I found my way to Darling Harbour, where the city loosens its collar and enjoys itself without apology.
Restaurants along the water. Lights reflected in the harbor. People moving without much urgency — families and couples and workers and wanderers, all of us drawn toward the water the way human beings have always been drawn toward it, for reasons older than reason.
They had Dr. Pepper in Australia. It tasted like home. Picture taken by Jimmie Aaron Kepler
It was there one evening, eating ice cream, that I noticed the wooden spoon.
Not plastic. Wood.
Small thing. Easy to overlook. But there it was — a small, deliberate choice in a world that had mostly stopped making them. Sydney is a city that lives beside the sea, and she has apparently decided that what you throw into the world does not simply disappear. That what you put out there matters. That the small choices are not actually small.
Held that little spoon for a moment. Thought about it longer than a spoon probably warrants.
Travel hands you these lessons tucked inside ordinary moments — if you stay awake enough to receive them. Most of the time we are moving too fast, checking the map, getting to the next thing. But every now and then, something small reaches up and catches you by the sleeve, and if you slow down enough to notice, there’s a whole sermon in it.
A wooden spoon. Thrown into the water. Going somewhere. Part of something.
There is a parable in there if you want one.
Australian National Maritime Museum
Australian National Maritime Museum taken by Jimmie Aaron Kepler
Near the end of the stay, visited the Australian National Maritime Museum.
After four weeks crossing the Pacific — after Lola’s fury and the long rolling miles of open water — the museum gave all of it a frame. Reminded me that people have always crossed water looking for something. Home. Trade. Survival. A new beginning. Or simply the next shore, because the current shore had stopped being enough.
Every voyage belongs to a larger human story.
Mine — modest as it was, cautious and comfortable compared to those old sailors in their wooden ships — belonged to it too. That felt like something worth sitting with for a while.
On the last morning, before the flight back to Dallas, stood at the window and looked out over the harbour one more time.
The first leg of the 20 hour flight home was Sydney to Los Angeles where I changed planes to DFW. This photo was the monitor on the back of the seat in front of me. The plane was a A380, the world’s largest passenger plane. I watched all eight films in the main Harry Potter series back-to-back during the flight.
Selfie of being settled in for the flight from Sydney to Los Angeles with one stop in Los Angeles.
The ferries were moving. The water was bright. The city had already started another day without asking my permission or needing my witness. Sydney did not need me at all — and that is the mark of a real place. One that goes right on living when you leave. One that was here before you arrived and will be here long after you are gone, receiving the next traveler with the same unhurried grace it offered you.
But standing there, grateful didn’t quite cover it.
Grateful for the long crossing and the storm survived. Grateful for the harbor light and the ferries and the garden paths and the old stone lanes of The Rocks and the wooden spoon.
Grateful that, every now and then, a weary traveler rounds a corner or clears a harbour entrance and the world quietly says: You made it. Rest here awhile.
Sydney said that to me.
Said it plainly, without fanfare, the way the best things usually do.
And this old road-worn pilgrim — dust on his boots, a little storm-blown, more grateful than he probably had words for — heard it just fine.
Getting there: Sydney is served by major international carriers across the Pacific. Budget a week minimum — less and you will only scratch the surface. Use the ferry system generously; it is how Sydney reveals herself. The Opal card covers ferries, trains, and buses. Stay near the harbour if you can. The morning light alone will justify the cost.
People travel from around the world to take a photo from this bridge with this background. Taken on the “Nyhavn Bridge,” one of two iconic spans in Copenhagen: the historic Nyhavnsbroen spanning the inner canal or the modern Inderhavnsbroen connecting the Nyhavn district to Christianshavn.
Copenhagen — A City That Doesn’t Ask You to Notice
There are cities that wave their arms at you from the moment you land—desperate, loud, needing to be loved. Copenhagen isn’t one of those. It has better sense than that. It just goes quietly about being itself, and somewhere in the walking and the water and the long October light, it earns its place in you without ever asking permission.
I arrived at the tail end of September 2025, when the season was handing itself off like a letter passed between strangers—something finished, something beginning. The light had gone the color of old honey over the rooftops and the canals. I did what I always do in a city worth knowing: I walked it. Walking is an honest way to meet a place. It slows you down enough to catch what the taxis and the tour buses miss—the clean stone buildings holding their ground, the easy marriage between the streets and the water, the bicycles moving through traffic the way pickup trucks move through the Hill Country back home. Steady, unhurried, belonging there.
When the feet needed rest, I rode the hop-on hop-off buses through the wider story. From the upper deck you could feel the rhythm of the city. And Copenhagen’s rhythm is a particular thing—it does not rush for the sake of being seen to rush. There is movement, yes, but not the frantic kind that wears you out just from watching it. Something in the architecture, in the way the people carried themselves on the streets below, seemed to understand that a life lived at a dead sprint is not much of a life at all.
The City on Two Wheels
Over 60% of adults ride bicycle to and from work. They are orderly, follow the traffic laws, and politely line up in queues at traffic lights. Photo taken by Jimmie Aaron Kepler in Copenhagen Denmark in October 2025.
Here is something worth stopping to consider. Copenhagen is home to somewhere around six hundred thousand bicycles—more bikes than people, in a city that takes that distinction seriously. On any given morning, more than sixty percent of residents commute by bicycle. Not as a statement. Not as a lifestyle brand. Just as the plainest, most sensible way to get from one place to another in a city built to accommodate exactly that. The cycling infrastructure is extraordinary—wide dedicated lanes running parallel to the streets, their own traffic signals, their own unspoken etiquette. Cyclists move through Copenhagen with the confidence of people who know the road belongs to them as much as anyone, because in this city, it does.
I have been to Amsterdam, which wears its bicycle culture proudly, and even there the numbers do not match what Copenhagen has quietly built. This is the most bicycle-dense city on earth, and yet it never felt chaotic. It felt coordinated. Mothers carried children in cargo bikes the size of small boats. Businesspeople in good coats pedaled through intersections without breaking a sweat. Old men rode with the unhurried authority of people who had been doing this since before it was fashionable. Watching it from the sidewalk, you got the sense that the bicycle here is not a symbol of anything. It is simply how a sensible people decided to move through their days—economically, quietly, without making the earth pay too high a price for the privilege.
A Jacket, a Prescription, and the Schooling of a Stranger
I needed a jacket. The weather had its own opinions, and I hadn’t packed for them. So I found myself at Fisketorvet, the big mall along the waterfront, and inside one of those clean, spare shops I met a young woman working the floor—Swedish, from Malmö, just across the Øresund Strait. She was the kind of beautiful that makes you wonder if the Norse people just kept certain secrets from the rest of the world. She walked me through the options with a patience that had nothing performative in it, and she helped me find what I needed.
What I hadn’t prepared for was the VAT—Denmark’s value-added tax, set at twenty-five percent across the entire country, one of the highest in the world and applied without apology to just about everything you might want to buy. It reminded me plainly that the world has its own systems and expects a foreign traveler to learn them without much fuss. There was paperwork. There was a refund arrangement for tourists—some portion clawed back if you navigated the process correctly—that may or may not have caught up with me later. Standing there in the shop, working through it all like a man trying to read a map upside down, what hit me wasn’t inconvenience. It was humility. Even buying a jacket can teach you something about being a stranger. Travel has that habit. It finds you out in ways you never quite anticipate when you are packing your bag back home, feeling like you have thought of everything.
But the real lesson came later, from a pharmacy and the people in it.
I had left my glaucoma drops back in Texas. Simple enough to forget, harder to fix in a foreign country. Denmark runs a socialized medical system—generous to the Danes, somewhat more of an adventure for the visiting American. I found a physician who spoke English as a second language and spoke it better than most people speak their first. She was calm and competent and wrote me a prescription without making me feel like a burden, which I very clearly was. In Denmark, a prescription goes straight into a nationwide system—any pharmacy in the country can fill it. That is a sensible arrangement. It speaks of a country that trusts its own infrastructure and expects that infrastructure to show up when it is needed.
The pharmacy near my hotel had no English speakers. Not one. Before the trip I had worked through some Danish on Babbel—nothing grand, just enough to point and gesture and not embarrass myself too badly. I stood at that counter with my broken phrases and my willingness to look foolish, and the people behind it met me more than halfway. What you remember from a moment like that isn’t the logistics. You remember the faces. The tone. The quiet willingness of a stranger to help a man who is clearly a long way from home. That kind of thing travels back with you. It says something about a people that no guidebook can quite put into words. Competence is one thing. Kindness layered over competence is something else entirely, and Copenhagen had both.
Water, Steeples, and the Evidence of Grace
The Swedish Church in Copenhagen Denmark taken by Jimmie Aaron Kepler in October 2025
The canals gave the city its softness. Water does that—slows your thoughts the way a good song slows your breathing. I spent time along the harbor watching the light move on the surface, and it felt less like sightseeing and more like permission to be still. The city opens itself around the water without making any grand declaration about it. There are no billboards asking you to appreciate the view. The view simply stands there, available to anyone patient enough to stop walking for a moment and receive it.
And there were churches. That always matters to me. In city after city across a good many years of road, the old churches and cathedrals anchor a place—standing there with a patience that outlasts the noise around them. Copenhagen had that witness. Old steeples rising above the rooftops like punctuation at the end of a long and complicated sentence. Sacred spaces tucked between the modern and the ancient, neither apologizing for the other. Signs that even in a well-ordered, thoroughly functional city, there remains that ancient human ache to reach past the visible world—to be quiet, to be grateful, to acknowledge that something larger than commerce and public order is asking for our attention.
Tivoli — Where Delight Has Been Doing Business Since 1843
Tivoli Amusement Park Copenhagen Denmark, taken by Jimmie Aaron Kepler October 2025
There is an amusement park in the middle of Copenhagen that has been open since 1843, and the remarkable thing is not that it has survived that long but that it has survived without losing its soul. Tivoli Gardens sits just outside the central train station, tucked inside the city like a secret the city has been keeping in plain sight for nearly two centuries. Walt Disney himself walked these grounds sometime in the early 1950s, and what he found here—the human scale of it, the gardens, the way wonder and order could be made to coexist inside a defined space—became the seed of an idea that would eventually grow into Disneyland. Every theme park that followed owes a debt to this place, whether it knows it or not. That is not a small thing to carry around in your history.
I was there during Tivoli’s fall season, when the park leans into Halloween with the particular enthusiasm of a place that has been in the business of enchantment long enough to know how it is done right. Pumpkins and lanterns and theatrical shadow were layered over the gardens with a craftsman’s touch—not the cheap, grab-bag horror of a roadside haunted house, but something more like a fairy tale that had taken a darker turn somewhere in the third act and was not entirely sorry about it. Costumed characters moved through the grounds. The old rides wore their seasonal decorations with a kind of dignity, the way a well-traveled man might put on a Halloween costume and still look like himself underneath it. The whole park felt like it was in on a good-natured secret and was happy to let you in.
What Tivoli offers even beneath the seasonal dressing is not the modern amusement park experience of maximum velocity and corporate branding and food that arrives in a paper boat with a logo on it. It is something older and more considered than that. There are gardens with flowers and pathways and the kind of careful attention to beauty that takes decades to cultivate and means it. There are rides, yes, and some of them have been thrilling people for longer than most nations have been nations. But there is also theater and live music and the particular atmosphere of a place that understands entertainment as something more than distraction. At dusk, when the Halloween lights came on across the grounds and the evening air carried just enough of an October chill to make you pull your new Danish jacket a little tighter, Tivoli became something that is hard to name without sounding like you are exaggerating. Walking those paths, thinking about a young Walt Disney walking the same ones seventy years before and seeing in them the shape of a dream he hadn’t quite dreamed yet—well, that added a layer to the evening that no amount of pumpkins and lanterns could have provided on their own. Some places carry their history lightly but carry it all the same, and you feel it in your feet before you feel it anywhere else.
Art and Antiquity — Copenhagen’s Museums Hold Their Ground
Photos taken in Copenhagen Denmark by Jimmie Kepler in October 2025
A city reveals its values in what it chooses to preserve. Copenhagen has chosen to preserve a great deal, and it has done so with the particular combination of Danish seriousness and Danish understatement that runs through everything here. The National Museum of Denmark carries the long story of this place—from the Vikings who gave the world its most durable reputation for sea-going audacity, through the medieval kingdoms, through the centuries of trade and war and diplomacy that shaped a small Nordic nation into something punching well above its geographical weight. The artifacts are presented with a clarity and intelligence that respects the visitor without condescending to them. You come out knowing more than you went in, which is what a museum is supposed to do.
The Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek stopped me in a way that I had not anticipated. It was built by the son of the man who founded the Carlsberg brewery—a patron who understood that a fortune spent on beauty is not a fortune wasted—and it houses one of the finest collections of ancient art outside the Mediterranean countries themselves. Egyptian antiquities. Greek and Roman sculpture. Impressionist paintings in rooms that give them the space and light they deserve. But it is the building itself that holds you first—the great glass dome rising over an interior garden of palms and silence, a place where the nineteenth century’s faith in art and civilization is preserved in the architecture the way amber preserves what it catches. I sat in that garden longer than I had planned to. Some rooms earn the time.
The SMK—the National Gallery of Denmark—carries the conversation forward into European painting across five centuries, with a particular strength in Danish Golden Age work that deserves far more international attention than it typically receives. Danish painters of the nineteenth century had a gift for light and interiority—a way of making an ordinary domestic scene feel weighted with something unspoken. Standing in front of those canvases, you understood that the same quality you felt walking the streets of the city had been here a long time before you arrived. The Danes have always known how to make the quiet moment carry the real meaning.
A Table Worth the Journey
Copenhagen has more Michelin-starred restaurants per capita than almost any city in the world, and the food culture here runs deep enough that it has reshaped how much of the Western world thinks about cooking. Noma changed everything when it arrived—put the Nordic larder on the world’s table, made the case that foraged herbs and fermented roots and the particular gifts of cold northern waters could produce food worth flying across an ocean to eat. The restaurant has since closed its doors in its original form, but the movement it launched is still very much alive in the city around it.
What I can tell you from the table is this: eating well in Copenhagen does not require a reservation secured six months in advance or a credit card that makes your accountant nervous. The philosophy has soaked into the entire food culture of the city. Even in a middle-tier restaurant—a neighborhood place with ten tables and a chalkboard menu—you encounter the same seriousness about ingredients, the same respect for what the season is actually offering, the same quiet pride in doing a simple thing with precision and care. I had a meal of smoked fish and dark rye bread and a bowl of something rooted and warming that I could not fully identify but did not want to stop eating. It cost less than a forgettable steak dinner back home, and I thought about it for days afterward. That is the measure of a food culture that has worked something out. It has decided that the question worth asking is not how much can be put on a plate but how honestly.
What a Place Leaves Behind
A Copenhagen Denmark Starbucks Coffee Cup. Yes, I found several Starbucks in Copenhagen.
What a traveler carries away from Copenhagen is not one landmark, not one moment of spectacle. It is the accumulation of small things handled with care—the walking, the water, the jacket and its paperwork, the doctor’s calm English, the pharmacy’s patient kindness, the old steeples standing watch, the Halloween lights of Tivoli coming on at dusk, the silence of a great glass dome over a garden of palms, the honest meal that cost less than it was worth, the cargo bikes rolling past with children aboard like a small daily argument for living sensibly.
Copenhagen felt civilized in the best and most honest sense of that word—measured, humane, grounded in the understanding that life is built mostly from ordinary moments, and that ordinary moments handled well are no small achievement. The city did not perform its virtues for you. It simply lived them, day by day, in the way its people moved through their streets and helped their strangers and kept the lights on and the canals clear and the bicycles rolling through the long Scandinavian afternoons.
I found God in Copenhagen the way I find Him in most places—not loud, not dramatic, not announced with any fanfare. More like the quiet testimony of a sanctuary still standing, the mercy of strangers in a pharmacy on a Tuesday afternoon, the grace of a city that has figured out how to be beautiful without asking you to applaud it.
In a world grown anxious and loud in its need to be noticed, that kind of quiet dignity is worth something. It sits with you on the flight home like a companion you didn’t expect to make—road-worn, unhurried, grateful in a way that is hard to fully explain but easy enough to feel.
Edinburgh Castle taken taken by Jimmie Aaron Kepler in October 2024
Stop Three in a Grand Journey Through the World’s Most Memorable Destinations
Then northward to Edinburgh.
Some cities make their case in a hurry. They flash their lights, show off their skyline, and seem determined to win you over before you have even found your bearings. Edinburgh is not that kind of city. Edinburgh comes on slower than that. It rises through stone and mist like something remembered rather than merely visited. It feels less like a place you arrive at and more like a place you have somehow wandered into from the pages of an old novel, one with weather in it, and church bells, and a little sorrow, and a good many stories.
A City Built of Story
If London speaks in history and Paris in poetry, Edinburgh speaks in story.
Sir Walter Scott Memorial in Edinburgh
That may be the first thing I felt there. The city does not simply contain stories. It seems built by them. They live in the closes and alleyways. They hang in the air around old kirks and weathered stone. They climb the streets with you and settle beside you when the mist rolls in. Sir Walter Scott feels near at hand there. So does Robert Louis Stevenson. Muriel Spark is somewhere in the shadows. Ian Rankin seems never too far away. Edinburgh wears its literary soul so naturally that it never feels staged or polished up for company. It just feels honest.
Where Harry Potter and History Shake Hands
And then, of course, there is J.K. Rowling.
Edinburgh carries that association too, and it fits the city better than you might think. Rowling lived there while writing much of the Harry Potter series, and she finished the seventh book at the Balmoral Hotel. Walking through the city, it is easy to see why Edinburgh found its way into her imagination. Many people connect Victoria Street, with its curve and color and old-world feel, to the spirit of Diagon Alley. Whether it served as a direct model or simply gave shape and mood to the world she was building, you can surely understand the connection. Edinburgh has that sort of magic to it—not the waving-a-wand kind, but the older kind, the kind that comes from atmosphere, memory, and stone.
Attribution: The Balmoral Hotel, Edinburgh, Schottland. Taken by: W. Bulach, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
One of the moments that stayed with me most was finding the cemetery near the university, Greyfriars Kirkyard, where memory seems to lie heavy on the ground and the old stones lean like they are tired but still standing watch. There, among those graves, I saw the name Thomas Riddell, the real name on a headstone that so many connect with Tom Riddle, the villain in the Harry Potter books. Standing there, looking at that weathered name cut into old stone, I had one of those travel moments that catches a person off guard. Literature and place seemed to shake hands right there in front of me.
That sort of thing happens in Edinburgh.
Stone, Mist, and Memory
The city rises in stone and shadow. The castle stands above everything like an old guardian, watching over the rooftops and streets as if it has seen too much to be bothered by the passing centuries. The Royal Mile feels less like a tourist route and more like a long corridor of history, lined with memory, struggle, worship, commerce, and stories too numerous to name. Walking there, I felt as though I had stepped inside a historical novel and had been given permission to stay a while.
Every closet and alley seemed to hold something. A memory. A rumor. A prayer. A page from a book not yet written. That is Edinburgh’s gift. It does not hand itself over all at once. It lets you discover it slowly, one stone, one turn, one view, one hush at a time in a very old city.
There is beauty there, yes, but it is not the polished, easy kind. Edinburgh keeps its edges. The mist matters. The weathered buildings matter. The distant sound of footsteps on cobblestones matters. It all adds up to a city with gravity. A city with texture. A city that has lived long enough to know that beauty and hardship are often old companions.
Kirks, Cobblestones, and the Nearness of God
And, as in so many places I traveled, I found churches there too.
Church with castle on the hill in the background taken by Jimmie Aaron Kepler October 2024.
That always matters to me.
In Edinburgh, the kirks, cathedrals, steeples, and sanctuaries seemed stitched right into the city’s soul. They stood there as witnesses to centuries of longing, struggle, reform, prayer, and praise. They reminded me once again that no matter how far I had traveled, I kept finding evidence of God’s presence. Sometimes it was in a grand cathedral. Sometimes it was in a smaller church standing quiet along an old street. Sometimes it was in the hush inside a sanctuary, in the worn wood of a pew, in the upward reach of a spire, or in the simple truth that generations before us had built places to worship because they knew the soul needs somewhere to kneel.
For anyone who loves history, faith, and literature, Edinburgh feels almost sacred.
Not sacred because it is soft or sentimental. Edinburgh is neither of those things. It has too much stone in its bones, too much weather in its face, too much history in its walls. But it feels sacred in the way some places do when they hold the marks of humanity honestly. Our fear. Our faith. Our imagination. Our ambition. Our longing to write something, build something, believe something, or pray something that might outlast us.
That is what stayed with me.
Edinburgh is not merely a city you see. It is a city you feel. It settles over you slowly, like the mist itself. It gets into your imagination. It makes you think of old hymns, worn books, candlelight, graveyards, sermon echoes, and stories told in low voices while rain taps at the glass.
Some places entertain you.
Edinburgh haunts you a little.
In the best possible way.
And that is why it belongs on this journey.
Grace and Peace, Jimmie Aaron Kepler, Ed.D.
Unless label otherwise, I took all the photos.
Did you enjoy this article? You can find more of Jimmie Aaron Kepler’s non-fiction books at NONFICTION and his speculative fiction books written as Jim Kepler at FICTION.
Jimmie Aaron Kepler standing in front of the Eiffel Tower in October 2024
From London, the journey moves to Paris.
A Slow Arrival in the City of Light
Paris does not rush out to meet you.
It unfolds slowly, like a poem read aloud on a gray autumn afternoon. It asks you to slow your step, take your seat, and stay awhile.
There is no city quite like Paris for the traveler who loves beauty, literature, memory, and reflection.
I was there in October 2024, and the city seemed to carry autumn with a kind of quiet grace.
The Seine Beneath a Cloudy Autumn Sky
The cloudy fall day along the Seine felt almost unreal.
Pictures of Seine River and selfie taken on a cloudy drizzly day in October 2024 by Jimmie Aaron Kepler
The bridges glowed in the fading light. The river carried reflections like liquid gold, and the whole city seemed to shimmer somewhere between history and dream.
This is a place made for lingering.
Paris does not ask you to hurry. It invites you to walk slower, look longer, and let the beauty have its say.
Where Hemingway and Fitzgerald Still Whisper
You feel it in the Latin Quarter, where the cafés still seem to hum with the ghosts of writers and artists who once sat at little round tables, smoking, arguing, dreaming, and putting words to paper.
Hemingway still seems close by in places like Les Deux Magots, Café de Flore, La Closerie des Lilas, Brasserie Lipp, and Le Select. Even the old Dingo Bar, now Auberge de Venise in Montparnasse, carries the echo of the night he met F. Scott Fitzgerald.
And then there is the Ritz on Place Vendôme, home to Bar Hemingway, one of the world’s most storied rooms for a quiet drink and a long memory. I had the opportunity to write in Paris. Woohoo!
Every corner of Paris feels cinematic.
Coffee at Cafe Richard in Paris France, October 2024, Photo by Jimmie Aaron Kepler
Architecture as Living History
The architecture is not just part of the city. It is the city.
Paris wears its history the way some people wear a well-cut coat — elegant without trying too hard. The broad boulevards are lined with cream-colored stone buildings, wrought-iron balconies, and slate roofs that catch the light like polished silver under a cloudy sky.
Walking here feels like moving through a grand open-air gallery where Gothic cathedrals, Beaux-Arts beauty, and Haussmann’s graceful nineteenth-century facades somehow live together without competing for attention.
Pictures of architecture taken in October 2024 by Jimmie Aaron Kepler
And what stays with you is not just the grandeur.
It is the way Paris makes beauty seem ordinary.
A corner apartment. A café terrace. A quiet side street. A flower stand. A woman crossing the boulevard dressed with such effortless style she looks as though she stepped off the pages of Vogue and onto the sidewalk without missing a beat.
The Atmosphere That Follows You Home
An afternoon beneath the Eiffel Tower.
An evening with coffee and a journal in Saint-Germain.
A slow walk along the Seine while the city settles into its evening glow.
Paris is less about checking off landmarks and more about surrendering to its atmosphere.
You do not merely visit Paris.
You feel it.
And once you have, some part of you never quite leaves.
Grace and Peace,
Jimmie Aaron Kepler
Did you enjoy this article? You can find more of Jimmie Aaron Kepler’s non-fiction books at NONFICTION and his speculative fiction books written as Jim Kepler at FICTION.
World’s most memorable destinations that I’ve visited
The first step in a grand passage through some of the world’s most memorable destinations that I’ve visited begins in a city that feels both deeply known and forever new.
London
Every great journey needs a fitting beginning, and for me this one begins in London.
There are cities that make a strong first impression, and then there are cities that seem to reach out from somewhere deeper, as if you have been moving toward them for years without fully knowing it. London has always felt that way to me. It is a city of grandeur, yes, but never the loud or showy kind. Its beauty is steadier than that. It rests in old stone, river light, Gothic towers, quiet parks, red double-decker buses, and the unhurried confidence of a place that has nothing left to prove.
London is the capital of the United Kingdom, the official name of the country, but those are only the facts of it. Facts tell you where a city sits on a map. They do not explain how it settles into the imagination.
What struck me most about London the first time I arrived in its heart was the strong and curious sense that I already knew it. Not completely, of course, and not in the way one knows a hometown or a street where one has lived. But I knew its mood. I knew something of its silhouette, its weather, its voice. I had met London long before I ever laid eyes on it. I had met it in books, in films, in history, in speeches from darker hours of the twentieth century, in old newsreels, and in stories that have shaped so much of the English-speaking world.
Literatures Impact on My Knowing London
Both as a child and in my adult reading life, London kept appearing. Sometimes it stood at the center of the story. Sometimes it appeared only for a chapter, a train platform, a street corner, a fogbound pursuit, or a scene that stayed with me long after the book was closed. The same has been true in film. Again and again, London has shown up not just as a backdrop, but as a living presence.
London is one of those rare cities a reader can feel he already knows before ever setting foot there, and a good part of that comes from the writers who have walked us through it for years.
Dickens gave us the London of Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, Bleak House, and Our Mutual Friend, full of fog, crowds, hardship, and human striving.
Doyle gave us the gaslit streets and rooms of Sherlock Holmes, where Baker Street became as real in the imagination as any address on a map.
Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and his elegant plays opened the doors to another London altogether, polished and witty on the surface, but often hiding darker truths underneath.
Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde gave the city a haunted double life, while Stoker’s Dracula let London become the stage where old-world evil met the modern age.
Ian Fleming made London part of the machinery of danger and intrigue in the James Bond novels, where clubs, offices, streets, and shadows all seemed to carry the scent of espionage.
The residence on the left is where the late Sir Sean Connery, the first James Bond lived. In the below photo you can see the front entrance of the residence of his real life neighbor, Sir Roger Moore, who also played the part of James Bond. He lived in the white residence. Their front doors were around the corner from each other. Interestingly, across the street from Connery’s from door entrance was the grounds of Buckingham Palace.
Pictures of Sean Connery and Roger Moore’s homes in London
And J.K Rowling, through the Harry Potter series, made London magical in a new way, turning King’s Cross, hidden alleys, and secret doorways into places readers would forever look at differently.
Taken together, these writers do something special: they make London feel less like a distant destination and more like a place we have already lived in through story, long before we ever arrive. I had already stood in its drawing rooms, crossed its bridges, entered its stations, and followed its shadows. By the time I finally came to London in person, it felt less like discovering a stranger and more like meeting, at last, a place I had known from a distance all my life.
London Feels Familiar
That may be one of London’s rarest gifts. It feels familiar even when it is new.
The city carries its history with remarkable ease. Westminster gathers together monarchy, Parliament, endurance, and national memory in one sweep of the eye. The Thames moves through the middle of the city with calm authority, as if it has watched the whole long story unfold and still intends to keep its own counsel. Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, the old facades and spires and bridges—these are not merely landmarks. They are part of a living conversation between the past and the present.
And yet London never feels trapped in history. That is one of the things I admire most about it.
Live in Present Tense
For all its pageantry and weight, London lives very much in the present tense. The cafés hum with conversation. The bookstores offer refuge and invitation. The West End glows toward evening with its old theatrical magic still very much intact.
During my last stay, my hotel was in the West End which can be considered the Broadway of London.
The parks give the city room to breathe. Even the weather, with its drifting rain and silver light, seems woven into the character of the place. And the traffic—Lord bless it—moves with a stubborn, relentless determination that may be as revealing as any monument.
Look up, to linger, to notice the details
Walking through London, I found myself slowing down. Not only because a city like that deserves your attention, but because it quietly asks for it. London does not shout. It does not need to. It invites you to look up, to linger, to notice the details—a clock tower against the morning sky, the worn dignity of old stone, the movement of the river, the sudden stillness in the middle of a busy square. It is a city best received at more than a glance.
For a traveler, that makes London unforgettable. For a writer, it makes London dangerous in the very best way. It stirs the desire to take one more walk, fill one more notebook page, sit one hour longer in a café, and follow one more street just to see what waits at the end of it.
I have now been to London three official times, and each visit has met me with a slightly different mood. That is the nature of great places, I suspect. They do not stay fixed because we do not stay fixed. We arrive older, more observant, more grateful, more burdened, more hopeful, and the city seems to answer the person we are when we meet it. Yet every time I have visited London, one truth has remained the same.
History there is not dead.
It is not locked away behind museum glass or confined to plaques and guidebooks. In London, history still breathes. It moves through the streets, lingers in the architecture, rises in the bells, drifts along the river, and waits in the spaces between old stones and modern lives.
And if you slow down enough, you can hear it.
This is where the journey begins.
The picture of Big Ben was taken by me in October 2025. I also took the picture of the former residences of Sir Sean Connery and Sir Roger Moore.
The organ is 550 years old at St Mary’s Church in Lubeck, Germany. In 1705 Johann Sebastian Bach came to Lübeck to hear the music and study under master organist Dietrich Buxtehude. Photo by Jimmie Aaron Kepler, taken in Lübeck Germany, October 2025.
There are some trips that do little more than stamp a passport and give you something pleasant to talk about over supper or over coffee with friends. Then there are the other kind, the ones that settle somewhere deeper down, in that inward country where memory, gratitude, and wonder all seem to live side by side. These journeys over the past five years turned out to be one of those.
Destinations
What first looked like a list of destinations on a map slowly became something else altogether. It became a gathering of moments stretched across oceans and years. It carried me over the Pacific and the Atlantic, across the Tasman Sea, the Caribbean, the North Sea, the Baltic, and even the old blue waters of the Mediterranean. It took me from island shores in Hawaii, Tahiti, and Samoa to the Caribbean islands, and onward to the Azores, Madeira, Mallorca, and Mo’orea, each place bringing its own weather, its own light, and its own way of lodging itself in the heart. It carried me through cities like London, Paris, Edinburgh, Belfast, Bergen, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Gibraltar, Barcelona, Sydney, Auckland, Papeete, Hamburg, and Lübeck, places where the streets themselves seemed to remember what generations before had built, prayed, endured, and hoped.
Along the way there were old cities worn smooth by time, and weathered harbors where the salt air seemed to drift in carrying stories of sailors, merchants, wars, departures, and homecomings. There were quiet afternoons inside ancient cathedrals where the sunlight came soft through stained glass and laid itself across stone floors that had known the footsteps of centuries. There were island mornings washed in turquoise and gold. There were streets where history did not seem trapped behind museum glass, but alive and nearby, as if it had decided to stroll alongside you for a while and keep you company.
Churches
And nearly everywhere I went, I saw churches.
Sometimes it was a grand cathedral rising over the city square, its bells marking the hour and its spire pointing heavenward as if to remind everybody below there is something higher than commerce, traffic, or politics. Sometimes it was a small stone church tucked along a side street, plain and weathered and faithful in its own quiet way. Sometimes it was a chapel by the sea, or an old parish church standing watch over a village, or a sanctuary open in the middle of the day where a traveler could step inside, sit in silence, and feel the hush settle over him.
In city after city, island after island, there was evidence of God’s presence.
Not always in loud ways. Not always in ways that would make a headline. But there it was all the same. In the old cathedrals built by hands long gone to glory. In candles flickering before prayer altars. In carved stone crosses worn smooth by time. In sacred music drifting faintly through old naves. In the faces of strangers showing kindness. In the beauty of morning light on water. In the deep human longing that built churches in the first place and still draws people through their doors.
That may be one of the things that stayed with me most. No matter the country, no matter the language, no matter the style of architecture or the shape of the harbor, I kept finding reminders that human beings everywhere have reached toward God. They have built sanctuaries. They have prayed under vaulted ceilings and plain wooden roofs. They have lifted hymns in cities and villages and on islands far out to sea. The settings changed. The languages changed. The weather certainly changed. But the witness remained.
Every place had a voice of its own. Some whispered. Some sang. Some simply stood there, quiet and sure of themselves, and let beauty do the talking.
Twenty-five Countries and Counting
Since April of 2022, I have traveled to twenty-five countries. I have not made that journey alone. Along the way I have had company from my walking stick—my cane, actually—named Virgil, as in Virgil Cane. My fiancée, she who cannot be named on the internet and who has no online presence at all, has shared much of the road with me. Friends from my writer’s group have also traveled alongside me from time to time, helping carry the laughter, the weariness, the wonder, and the occasional confusion that always seems to come with trying to find your way in a place where even the street signs look like they belong to somebody else’s story.
Travel, at least the kind worth remembering, has a way of humbling a person. It reminds you that the world is both far larger and far more intimate than you imagined. You can stand in a cathedral half a world away and feel something familiar stir in your chest. You can sit by a harbor in another country and watch the water move against old stone, and know deep down that human beings have always been longing, leaving, loving, grieving, building, and hoping. The scenery changes. The heart does not all that much.
That may be one reason I have loved these journeys as much as I have. They have shown me beauty, yes, but they have also shown me continuity. The world is wide, but there are threads that run through it all. Hospitality. Reverence. Memory. Music. Bread on a table. Light on water. The hush inside a church. The laughter of strangers. The sense, now and then, that you have stepped into a place that was waiting to tell you something if only you would slow down enough to listen.
And slowing down has been part of the lesson.
A cane will teach you that. Age will too. Travel has a way of reminding you that not every journey is meant to be rushed through as if you were checking items off a list. Some places ask for lingering. Some call for sitting still. Some deserve more than a photograph and a hurried sentence in a notebook. Some deserve your full attention.
That is what this series is about.
What follows is the story of that journey, told through the destinations that have stayed with me the most. I have ranked them not by cost or popularity, not by travel-brochure promises or online trends, but by memory, feeling, and by that harder-to-define quality of whether a place settled into my soul and decided to stay there.
These are the places that have lingered.
These are the old stones, the quiet harbors, the island mornings, the church bells, the cathedrals, and the city streets I still carry with me.
This is the journey behind the journey. I’ll be sharing the wonders of where I’ve visited in the weeks ahead.
Grace and Peace
Jimmie Aaron Kepler
Did you enjoy this article? You can find more of Jimmie Aaron Kepler’s non-fiction books at NONFICTION and his speculative fiction books written as Jim Kepler at FICTION.
