Wander-lust-ing.

Photo from 47th St Beach

I've often wondered, is it possible to have wanderlust without having traveled much in the past? As you guys can probably tell from my recent posts/Instagrams (and even the fact that I changed the title of this part of my site from "blog" to "journal" a while back), I've been all about traveling and adventures lately. As a kid, I never really traveled much. We didn't take many family vacations, nor did we spend our summers wandering through Europe. Most of our free time was spent driving back and forth from North Carolina to Virginia to visit our family, and that's more than okay. But I think that not traveling a ton when I was young made me even hungrier to see new things, and explore new places as a young adult. I'm constantly thinking about where I can go next, and how the hell am I going to be able to afford it.

Recently, I've become slightly obsessed with the idea of seeing as much of America as possible. I'm not sure if that's because of cost, or just because I feel like so many people I talk to have been all across Europe, but they've barely seen any of this beautiful country we live in. I'm on a mission to see all of America while I'm young, and I wanted to start right here, in Chicago.

Chicago is a very large city, and I feel like I have barely scratched the surface. I wanted to explore a little bit more. I felt the summer running out on me a bit (the bottom drops out quickly, in terms of temperatures in Chicago), so I decided to take a beautiful Saturday and stuff many of the things I love about the summer here, and pack it into one day. Rather than tell you step by step what all I did, check out my Instagram posts, as I tried my best to document it in the form of iPhone photos. From north on Lakeshore, to a Southside park, I covered about 45 miles on my bike exploring all over the city. It was a incredible amount of fun, and I'm looking forward to doing more of these small adventures in the future.  Seeing and exploring other neighborhoods I haven't spent much time in.

So here's to having fun in the city you already live in. Even if it's much smaller than Chicago, I'm sure there's something there you haven't seen.