Reminding myself why

How do you cram the absurd accumulation of treasures in the Vatican art collection into a 5 hour tour? And then how do you boil that down into a not overly long blog entry?

The question brings me back to why I started doing this. I've always found that my best recollections of trips were letters that I wrote to friends along the way. On one occasion, I wrote letters to the same person every day for a post-college seven week cross country trip with the explicit expectation that I would get a look at them when I returned.

This plan was complicated by my being in love with this person and her not only not loving me back, but in fact had the hots for one of my traveling companions. So I never actually got ahold of all of them, but the ones I saw were vivid and true to the way I spoke and thought about the trip as it was happening, each focused on a single day. They were clearly superior to the general "how was the trip?" kind of bland answers.

The point was further driven home to me just a few years ago when a close friend died and one day out of the blue his sister returned to me a number of letters I sent him from my trips. They offered a level of excitement and specificity that I could never possible attain after the trip was over.

It was in this spirit that I blogged the China trip in 2006. And I really felt that it helped to make my trip more fulfilling at the same time I was keeping in touch with just my friends. So how do I sum up the vast Vatican collection, already condensed to a 5 hour tour? Especially given that I find most guidebooks on this kind of thing to be unreadable? Stay tuned.