Cara Ellen Modisett (in tree) and sister Meg in 1983.

I’m home from a trip to Highlands, N.C., where I attended the town’s first annual culinary festival (see our upcoming March/April issue for the story). Back in the office and wading through messages, I heard this wonderful start to a voicemail: “Hey Cara, this is Leonard Adkins – just got home yesterday from our 2,174-mile hike.”
Adkins, who writes a nearly-every-issue hiking column for us, and his wife, Laurie, have spent much of this year hiking the AT (you can read his reports online at habitualhiker.com).

“Travel” means many things to many people. I’m not so much of 2,174-mile-hike traveler. I’m more of a missed-the-turn-and-found-something-unexpected traveler.

On my way back from Highlands, for instance, I meant to take N.C. 280 just past Brevard, but overshot and ended up driving into Hendersonville – and right past Thomas Wolfe’s angel. I turned off U.S. 64, parked my car in the cemetery and walked a few yards to gaze into her quiet marble face. This is a pilgrimage I hadn’t made yet, and my wayward driving made it for me, unplanned and unexpected.

But back to the tree trunk.

That’s me, and in front of me my sister Meg. While we were growing up, every fall and spring weekend our family and our friends, the Scotts, would head for Natural Chimneys Regional Park in Mt. Solon, Va. We kept a camper parked there all season – no huge house on wheels, just a little trailer with a kitchen table that converted into a bed and a shower that was so small we didn’t bother and used the bath house instead.

We’d head out on a Friday after school, leaving school and city for woods, campfires and cricket-filled nights. When we first arrived, we had to finish our homework on the camp table, but for the rest of the weekend, we were on our own. Thinking back, I tried to remember what we did on those trips, and there’s nothing specific or momentous. We were just four kids on bikes, exploring the trails and woods of the campground, making hideouts, roasting marshmallows, swimming, reading books, playing games. Only the rain and bedtime would send us inside.

It didn’t last long enough. High school band and football games and teenagers’ schedules spelled the end of our weekends in the woods, and I miss them still. They were the best kind of family travel, for me – nothing fancy, just time with each other in the outdoors.

You hold in your hands our annual travel guide issue, with pages full of ideas for your 2008 trips – from family weekends to miles of hikes to missed turns.

Two of our contributors have traveled back to the mountains from great distances. Novelist Adriana Trigiani, who works and lives in New York City, wrote “The Mountains: My Hopes” for this issue. Her column is a trip back to her childhood home in Big Stone Gap, Va.

Tokyo photographer Makoto Takada shares images of West Virginia winters in our photo essay, starting on page 40. For him, Appalachian travel has been with a mission in mind. He spent 22 months in West Virginia over the course of 12 years, volunteering for an environmental organization there.

“The same things are happening here and there, on both side of the Earth. Losing nature, global warming, stronger hurricanes and typhoons,” he writes in an e mail. “The earth is a system in which everything is connecting. When we do any action to the system, some reaction comes back to us.”

His words point out that no matter how far we go, we’re not far from home.

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