been there. done that.

I've long been fascinated by the idea that you can be homesick for a place you've never been. A city, a countryside, a dot on a map. On library days, when most girls headed to the section containing the latest series of "Baby-sitter's Club," I'd go to the travel section and browse books on big cities and fabled European countries like Germany and France. In my head I'd rack up Frequent Flier Miles, planning trips to various places, hitting all the historic landmarks, sitting in on concerts in old buildings, and dining at the best restaurants.

My parents and grandparents facilitated such flights of the mind with tales from their own travels and time lines, Dad spending some of his youth in Berlin; Grandpa growing up in New York; both Grandmas toting tots in planes, trains, and automobiles and doing some traveling of their own. Dad kept a box full of maps gathered from National Geographic magazine, AAA and the like, and many Sundays weren't complete without the Rand McNally spread wide across the dining room table. (They often still aren't).

I believe I've referenced it before, but I've picked it up Alain de Botton's "The Art of Travel" to read in tandem with Gopnik's "Paris to the Moon," the past few nights. Gopnik validates the sense of self I felt I found along the streets of Paris although I'd never before been. He writes that the physical Paris looked exactly like the pictures of the place in his childhood head; the Paris he'd created by piecing together old black and white movies with scenes from "The Red Balloon." Marrying this thought with one of de Botton's, that "It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter ourselves," brings the notion that our feet can find the familiar between the cobblestones of the Ile de la Cite just as well as they can find the familiar between lines on the sidewalk skipping home from school.