Today’s travel post is just a listing of two different sets of destinations – one that I am thankful for and one that is relevant to Thanksgiving here in the US. If I delve further, I will find more places in both lists but these were the ones at the top. Hopefully, I will review these places in detail in future.

There are some travel destinations that I have been to/visited for which I am truly thankful – the moment I had my first glimpse (and sometimes many repeated glimpses) of that place, my heart was at peace, I felt strangely calm (or should I say calmer! since I was not really feeling disturbed before that) and way more refreshed when I left that place than I had been when I arrived. The list is below (in no particular order):

• Avenue of the Giants (Photo 1)
• Sankat Mochan Hanuman Temple at Mt.Madonna, CA
• The Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima in Portugal
• Borobudur temple ,Sumatra, Indonesia
• Hakone Tea Gardens, Saratoga, CA
• Baba Budangiri ,Karnataka, India (Photo 2 – falls near the shrine)
• Butchart Gardens, Victoria, BC, Canada
• Shiva temple in the place where I lived for the first 18 years of my life (Photo 3)
• Harihareshwara temple in Harihar, Karnataka, India (Photo 4)
  

  Photo 1

Photo 4

Photo 3

• 
  

  Photo 2

On a different note, some places to visit that are relevant to Thanksgiving history in America:

• Plymouth in England
• Cape Cod
• Plimoth Plantation in Plymouth, MA
• Provincetown, MA
• Navajo Country

Theme Thursdays: Place/Location Description is the theme this time over at ‘Reading Between the Pages’ who hosts this weekly meme. The rules are:

• A theme will be posted each week (on Thursday’s)
• Select a conversation/snippet/sentence from the current book you are reading
• Mention the author and the title of the book along with your post
• It is important that the theme is conveyed in the sentence (you don’t necessarily need to have the word)

“Next he passed through a long section of forest and then a few miles later he saw the towboat station across from Fayette City, the piers and enormous white storage tanks, a handful of towboats tied up, smokestacks and pilothouses and stubby square bows, empty barges moored along the opposite bank. The trees and brush, the green was pushing out everywhere, it was an uprising, it was above him and around him and over the water, there was not a single bare spot except for the trackbed gravel.”

Meyer, Philipp (2009-02-18). American Rust: A Novel (p. 105). Spiegel & Grau. Kindle Edition.