Bookstores and adventures!

Listening To: "All I Have" by Mat Kearney
(For whatever reason, I've been semi-obsessed with his music lately. I like his style and I like his lyrics. His album City of Black & White is my favorite at the moment. Good stuff.)

I love bookstores. I could stay in them for hours on end and not ever get bored. I've done this twice within the past week, and still don't feel like I was in there long enough. I get so inspired in them--I like and am interested in so many different things and there just isn't enough time to get to all of it! Every time I go, I have to restrain myself from buying out the whole store. (My bank account does not share my love for bookstores. Heh.)

A couple of days ago, I had to go to Barnes & Noble to get a book for my psych classes before my trip. This resulted in my spending a good amount of time in the psychology section. The book I had to buy was Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. I'm pretty sure I would have bought it anyway, even if it wasn't required. It's basically about his experiences in a concentration camp during WW2 and then he kind of talks about it from a psychological standpoint. Very interesting. (I've always been fascinated by the Holocaust. The fact that I'll be visiting Dachau on my trip was a major selling point for me! Speaking of Dachau, I'll be there in two weeks! Yessss.)

Anyway, after wandering throughout the store, I found the children's section. Best. Section. Ever. I absolutely love kids' books, especially the classics (i.e. Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, stuff like that). I discovered a copy of A Little Princess and absolutely had to buy it. I had never read it, but always wanted to. It is sooo good. I love stuff like that. I also found The Magic Treehouse series that I LOVED when I was a little kid. I read those books countless times in second grade. They are what first inspired me to visit the Amazon Rainforest (it's still very high on my list of places I want to visit). They tended to make me feel like I've been feeling today: dying to go on some sort of adventure!

Reason I've been feeling that way today: I spent the afternoon sitting in the floor at Books-A-Million reading this:

I would've bought it if it hadn't cost $25. Pretty much every single thing in this book looks awesome and I want to do all of them. Well, almost all of them (I could probably do without going to Antarctica, as cool as it would be to say I've done that. Not high on the list). But for real, that is the kind of stuff I am dying to do. There are so many things that I want to try--I just haven't had the chance to (yet!). Seriously, that's pretty much the only reason I would want to have a high-paying job: to travel and do awesome stuff like that (I kind of hate the fact that every sport I would actually really enjoy are the ones that are ridiculously expensive to do). Sigh.

My other find of the day wasn't all that spectacular, but it did make me really happy to see. I was in the travel section (one of my favorites) and picked up a book about Tennessee. They had a section about the Cherokee National Forest, including a short mention of Chilhowee--picture included. The picture (not the one to the right--that one is mine) just so happened to be from the Sugarloaf overlook, which is my absolute favorite place to watch the sun set. Kristi, Mike, Jon, and I were up there a couple of weeks ago, just before the semester ended. I think it was one of the best nights I had all semester long--maybe even all year. Definitely one of my favorite memories. That fact just made finding the picture even better, because it was of the picnic table that Kristi did her homework on that night, and you could see the rock that Mike and I sat on to watch the sunset in the background. Ahhh, good times.

Edit (05/24/10): I didn't really want to write a whole new post just for this, but this picture is awesome (click to make it bigger--it looks better):

Credit

How cool is that?! I just wanted to share. :)