Among assorted ticket stubs and note cards that I keep pinned to the bulletin board above my desk is a photograph of my mother. In the photograph, she is standing on the outdoor platform of the train station in Stratford-Upon-Avon in England. She has placed her large red hiker’s backpack on the bench in front of her. Minutes before I snapped the picture, she had unzipped the bag and clawed through its contents frantically, searching for items of clothing that could be abandoned before we stepped on to the train to London. By the time I had actually pulled out the camera to document what I believed was, after two weeks in England, the breathtaking zenith of mother’s madness, she had already stuffed a pair of ratty black stretch pants into a large gap in one of the pillars supporting the platform’s roof.

I keep this photograph pinned to my bulletin board not so much as a memento of our trip to England, but as contrast to the picture I’ve placed next to it—a photograph of my mother as a modish, stunningly beautiful young woman with thick dark hair, large brown eyes and a tender, diffident expression on her face. She is standing in front of a Christmas tree, holding a bottle of Old Granddad Bourbon—a 21st birthday gift—in front of her like a religious offering. I’ve paired these photographs because they represent a narrative that, at some point in time, had diverged. One, with its history of holiday snapshots, tight Capri pants, and slim menthol cigarettes, had ended abruptly at some unknown point in time. The other, a postmodern tale of concealed discontent, aggressive idiosyncrasies and existential slovenliness, had flourished, and was the story of my mother that I knew by heart.

My mother and I were participants in an uneasy friendship, one established on the milder sides of adolescence, for me, and menopause for my mother. As a child, I was labeled by child psychologists as “difficult” and “emotionally labile”; they considered my mother “tentative,” with “poor instincts.” Later, when she was no longer engaged in compulsory mothering and I was bored with petulance and resentment, we found these succinct psychological biographies humorous. It seems we had been exquisitely mismatched—or, if you were particularly fascinated by the physics of animosity, extraordinarily well matched. We were uncomfortable around each other. I thought, for many years, that my mother simply didn’t like me. She wrapped my two younger sisters in affectionate embraces many times in a day. I received hugs only upon returning home after a long absence, and only because other family members were present and it seemed the right thing to do. When my mother and I were obligated to hug, we leaned into it precariously, leaving a large gap between our midsections. My college friends who witnessed our rare hugs called my mother “the flaming pole” because that’s how I embraced her. Living away from home, though, softened my impressions of my mother, and time and distance seemed to erase the notion my mother had of me. As we both grew older, we tried to dismiss our former hostilities as rumors.

The olive branch had come in the form of an invitation from my mother to accompany her to Disneyworld one spring. I was a freshman in college and should have been following the herd to some Mexican resort town or to a Florida coastal city, but my first years of college were not much different from my years in high school. I never seemed in the loop. So I accepted my mother’s invitation to Disneyworld. Everyone had been surprised that we took the trip together, and somehow we’d managed to have a good time. It was the first trip we’d taken alone together. My mother bought a wedding cake topper with Mickey as groom and Minnie as bride for a collection she claimed to have started since I’d left for college. She bought me trinkets—a charm bracelet, a stuffed animal, a sweatshirt. She got drunk at a Spanish restaurant in the Epcot Village and as we exited the park around closing time, she clung to my arm and I felt a little uncomfortable. The trip, however, was an overall success because we did not fight. Since then, travel has been the conduit through which my mother and I conduct the business of being mother and daughter. Our roles in the family can be shed when we are far from the spell of home.

In that spirit, we’d decided to take a trip to England. My mother had liked the idea but said she had to talk to “Frick and Frack” to get things settled at the travel agency and then had to get the “snips and snaps” of the accommodations in England set. But most importantly, she needed to start planning out the packing design. My mother is a militant packer—she takes pre-vacation sorting very seriously. Before our trip to England was even on ticket, she had drawn a strategic map marked with possible land mines (should the toothpaste go into the side zipper with the earrings, or would that leave us with a pierced tube?) and delegation of troops (the front will push forward with the sweaters while the second battalion will linger behind with the underwear—if we lose a few, we'll survive. We can turn the remaining undies inside out.) She made it clear that she was "packin' light". The objective was to travel with as small a burden as possible.

Since we planned to bike, my mother insisted that we bring along a pair of futuristic bike shorts, with a crotch protector built in. Held in hand, the shorts cut a frightening figure. The back end was stiff with its nylon and cardboard diaper and the fabric was slick and dangerously adept at harboring static electricity. Not necessarily a feature one looks for in a pair of skin-tight surrogate underwear. My mother would also find room for her portable apothecary, stowed in an oversized Ziploc bag—hormone pills, vitamins, anxiety pills and heart medicine. The contents of that Ziploc bag were now strewn across the bureau in Room Three of Badminton Villa in Bath, England.

The fog had been hanging thick and low over the short-stacked city of Bath when we arrived. My mother and I had been headed to a bed and breakfast somewhere on the southern slopes of the valley and were waiting for our host, John, to pick us up and take us there. A tiny red Volkswagen puttered its way through the heavy mist and honked at us cheerfully. John, a paunchy bald man, was uncomfortably pinned between the steering wheel and the driver’s side seat, but he was smiling and waving us in.

“Hello girls,” he shouted. “Put your bags in the back and hop in.” When we arrived at the inn, John had taken our bags and sat us down in the drawing room. “Bath is a tea saucer, if you think about it,” he said. He owned Badminton Villa, along with his wife Sue. They were a middle-aged couple, whom we rarely saw together. “And anyway, a tea saucer curves upwards doesn’t it? Well if you think about it, our little place is situated on this side of the tea saucer.” My mother and I had leaned towards him and studied the invisible tea saucer he was holding delicately in the palm of his hand. “And you really must take the Mad Max comedian’s tour of the city,” he said. “Hilarious. Tears rolling, roaring with laughter. Absolutely roaring.” I roared with fake laughter because John was laughing and I felt obliged to find the English as funny as they sometimes found themselves. But my mother had no tact—how dare she not fake laugh? Not even a fake smile for his troubles.

When we finally escaped from the living room, it was late evening and because I was mildly jet-lagged, we had gone to bed early. My mother spent ten minutes in the bathroom, brushing her teeth, hacking up phlegm and washing her underwear in the sink. When she emerged, she was rosy-cheeked and composed in the way one is when they are in the full swing of their nightly ritual…maybe even a little giddy because she’s discovered this ritual can be completed on foreign soil. The ritual continued. Before getting into her bed, my mother had to check the windows and her underwear drying on the sill, take her hormone pills lest another whisker appear on her chin, check under her pillow for her book (Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis) and, as a kind of final flourish, scratch herself like a baseball player about to take the plate. She performed this last, particularly unsavory act to force an exasperated, disgusted sigh from me, which was usually produced promptly. My mother liked nothing better than to watch me squirm. However, I was determined to foil her this trip by just not reacting, so I just evaluated her activities as coolly and as silently as a nurse on a mental ward.

I dreamt of my first English breakfast that night. Breakfast was a curio in my life, gone the way of tin lunchboxes and Frogger. Once an indispensable part of my existence, it had slowly lost relevance. While I wouldn’t be opposed to having a breakfast, it wasn’t something I’d bother to prepare for myself. But the very name, Bed and Breakfast, conjured up two of my favorite things: sleep and food. I was ready to tackle the English Breakfast.

“Good morning ladies,” John said as my mother and I walked down the stairs into the breakfast room. “I trust you slept well and that you’re ready for breakfast.” My mother surveyed the breakfast bar set against the back wall— a serving bowl full of scab-like prunes in juice, a canister of corn flakes and a dish of stringy grapefruit quarters—and said,

“I know Ashley’s hungry,” my mother said, the tone of sarcasm in her voice too subtle for John to catch.

“I know Mom’s hungry,” I said to John flatly. We sat down at the table nearest the window and waited for our coffee. John had asked us what we “desired” for breakfast. I said I’d have the English breakfast. My mother said she’d have a bowl of Cornflakes from the breakfast bar. John looked crushed. A few minutes later he emerged from the back kitchen with my first English breakfast balanced on his palm. Two slabs of ham, thick and curled around the edges; a soft-boiled egg, the yolk suspended in a delicate skin of egg white; a brown sausage, smooth and taut under its casing; and a fat, midget tomato. It looked like dinner.

My mother watched me as I ate; it was an annoying habit of hers. If she caught one of her daughters—she had three—tucking into a bag of potato chips, she’d say, “Like those potato chips, huh?” If, on the other hand, we caught her eating a Mal-o-mar in the sunroom while watching Larry King Live, she’d stuff the offending wrapper between the sofa cushions before we had a chance to comment. My sisters found such behavior amusing and would often pounce on my mother, laughing, and try to find the wrapper so they could say “Like those Mal-o-mars, huh Mom?” I, on the other hand, always felt slightly embarrassed when I interrupted my mother’s covert snacking and said nothing. She never returned the favor. So it was with this history of aggravation that I thought about asking my mother to stop watching me eat. But I hesitated, and during that moment of hesitation, my mother picked up her fork and speared a piece of my ham. I didn’t say anything about it, and neither did she.

The next day we moved on to the Cotswolds, an area in the southwest of England, carved of limestone and chalk. May had turned the hills and valleys into a bright emerald, and the wildflowers were in bloom: buttercups and burnt orchid, wood sorrel and crosswort, cow wheat and bluebells and foxglove. We stepped out of the car from time to time, awash in a sea of brilliant yellow Canola. I could tell my mother was getting antsy. “I can only take so much beauty” was a complaint I heard from her at least once a vacation. When she’d reached this point of beauty overload, she’d stand a little way off from everyone else and try very hard to look bored and put-upon.

It was cool dusk when my mother and I arrived in Moreton-in-Marsh, a north Cotswold village on the Fosse Way. When we attempted to check in to the Redesdale Arms hotel, no one was at the front desk, and no one appeared after we rang the bell. My mother stomped into the vacant dining room and reappeared with a bartender.

“I’m sorry,” he said, tugging at his bowtie, “our front desk help quit this morning.” He blinked furiously behind his thick glasses, and struggled with the hotel computer, which was a vintage Apple LCII. I found myself trying to lip-read. His thick country accent rendered much of what he said muddy and difficult to decipher. Like she had done on a number of occasions since we had arrived in England, my mother nodded and smiled when she was spoken to, and pretended like she understood what the bartender was saying as he checked us in. My mother thought she could fake it by watching the speaker intently, and look like she was paying attention. When the speaker would stare at her expectantly, waiting for a response or a reaction, she would come up empty. And, instead of asking the person to repeat himself, she’d panic, put her hands to her head and say, “Before I can answer any questions, I have to have my coffee.” Most often this response came quite far removed from her morning coffee, and whomever she was speaking to looked doubtful and a little sad.

After the bartender checked us in, we headed to the pub where he was tending the bar and where my mother wanted to down a Guinness or three. Because we were the only patrons in the place, he tossed us a deck of cards with sticky backs. He watched us struggle to remember the rules of Poker and Blackjack. He seemed decidedly unimpressed when he saw us begin a game of Go Fish.

“Do you have a nine of puppy dog’s feet?” Sip of Guinness.

“No clubs, Mom. Go Fish. Do you have the ten of spades?”

“You mean the ten of shovels?”

Sigh.

“Yes, Mom. The ten of shovels.” I had fallen prey to my mother’s carefully fashioned eccentricities. For the years that I’d been in my mother’s life, she’d been a disheveled, idiosyncratic, self-made caricature of herself. I remember how shocked I was when I stumbled across old wedding photographs tucked away in my mother’s underwear drawer. A slim, petite woman with long, smooth black hair pulled away from her face to reveal an attractive, broad forehead, was holding a bouquet of silk gardenias. She was smiling demurely. Her beauty so mesmerized me that I didn’t immediately notice that the groom in the photograph was not my father. I learned, after considerable effort, that my mother had married once before—she had kept it a secret for thirteen years. The man in the wedding photographs was an alcoholic ex-soldier named Carl who had an overbite and no decorations. After my discovery, my mother preferred to keep both Carl and his bride tucked away in a box in our attic.

After a restless night at the Redesdale Arms—beds with swayed box springs and itchy sheets—we prepared for a bike tour of the Cotswolds. An unguided bicycle tour of the Cotswolds was ambitious any way you looked at it, but it was especially daring for us because our combined sense of direction was “I still don’t understand how to get the needle to go north to this compass!” But we were determined to conquer the ruthless terrain of the Cotswolds—to stare down those sheep and conquer those one per cent incline hills and not walk our bikes up steeper ones. I was wearing the bike shorts that my mother had so carefully packed for me, folded into a kind of tent thanks to the cardboard crotch protector. It seemed, to my mother, vitally important that we avoid straining that part of our body, where a bike seat can be so cruel.

“How far are we going today,” my mother asked. I knew the response she was looking for was “two miles, Mom, then we’ll stop for lunch,” but I consulted my mental almanac of my father’s accomplishments for the appropriate answer. My father was the very model of fitness, climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro and Mt. Rainier in one year, trekking through Peru the next, ice climbing frozen waterfalls and running up hilly jogging trails wearing a forty-pound weight vest. My parents were an odd match. They’d met at Bowling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C. My father, fresh from an assignment in King Salmon, Alaska, had just been assigned to temporary desk duty. The secretary in his office, the former assistant to Attorney General Ramsey Clark, was a sassy brunette named Barbara who sometimes brought Shawn, her hyperactive Irish Setter, to work with her. My father liked my mother’s legs, her lips and her laugh. He’d learn to like Shawn.

At the end of our sixteen-mile trek, my mother had conquered a number of Cotswold hills—on foot, pushing her bike. We were set for another outing the next day and we looked forward to it. But when we woke up the next morning, we could barely walk. It seems the crotch-protecting bike shorts hadn’t done their job. The pain was excruciating, the kind which is impossible to adequately recount to others. I watched my mother walk bow-legged to the bathroom.

“It’ll be better once we get on the bike,” I said to her through the bathroom door. She walked out with a pair of underwear in her hand (left to dry on the sill overnight) and grimaced. It was a look that said, ‘Hey kid, I’ve been there. I’ve been face to face with the kind of pain you only read about in war novels. This is the front-line and if you think you can beat this kind of pain, then you are in for the shock of your life.’

One mile into our second bike tour and I was on the front line of physiological warfare. The pain was insidious and embarrassing and shared. My mother and I approached hills bitterly. We felt betrayed by sharp curves. Now my mother pushed her bike whenever she thought I wasn’t looking.

That evening my mother and I decided to stuff ourselves at dinner. The cost was absorbed in our bike package, along with the price of the hotel room. Since it was paid for, my mother said, might as well “fill ‘er up.” I pointed out that we had stuffed ourselves to the point of pain every night since we arrived in England.

“But we don’t eat that often,” my mother said. “Pass the clotted cream.” In the presence of others, both my mother and I ate the way many women do; small, delicate bites, taking care to wipe our mouths, running our tongue over our teeth to be sure nothing has lodged between them. But something strange happens when it’s just my mother and I eating; we devour our meal as if it is our last.

“Yes, we don’t eat that often, but when we do, we feast.” I said. “Pour some gravy on that and send it down here.” I had to put a napkin over my mouth because I’d taken too large of a bite. Food was an “issue” in my house. My mother had been watching her weight ever since she’d had children. I, too, had been engaged in a perpetual battle with food. By phone, my mother shared her latest Weight Watchers’ success or disappointment, and I told her that I’d finally gotten on a regular exercise regimen. We traded weight loss aphorisms (“it’s a change of lifestyle” and “I just want to be able to tuck my shirt in and not think about it”), but when we were away from home, something changed. We ate without hesitation. It was the only time I ever felt comfortable eating around my mother.

“Well, I think we deserve it. We’ve watched our diet to get in shape for this bike trip and I think we owe it to ourselves to have a dessert one night, or an extra helping of carbohydrates. Will you hand me the butter? No, not that light crap.” Rationalization was understandable, but in truth, every meal was another feeding. Dish it up, slop it up, put it on a plate and we'd lick that plate.

We moved on to Stratford-Upon-Avon the next morning, a pretty town where the black timbers of pubs and houses curved under the weight of years and where nearly everything was named after a Shakespeare play. Shakespeare was born here and though he spent most of his life in London, this town is a proud and somewhat obsessive sycophant.

I knew my mother had recently purchased an electric-powered paper shredder for her home office but I had not foreseen her manic need to shred paper on the road. Tickets, restaurant bills, receipts—receipts were especially frustrating. A single credit card receipt had to be ripped up in intervals and disposed of in at least three different trashcans. My mother thought this ingenious. She carried pocketfuls of shredded paper and sometimes I’d see her put her hand in the pocket and rifle through the scraps before they were distributed in a host of trashcans.

“People dig through trash cans, trying to piece together one single receipt,” my mother said when I told her that I’d had a dream of sound the night before—no images, only sound. The sound of paper being torn, shredded, deposited. “I mean, your life is on that receipt,” she said.

“The business doesn’t put your whole credit card number on it, Mom.” I said.

“No, they’re sharp. They can figure it out.” I imagined a “they” that was proficient at finite mathematics and the laws of probability. I pictured “them” digging through a trashcan outside of the Stratford-Upon-Avon train station where we’d just arrived, finding a receipt and scurrying to a nearby doorway and calculating probability down to the only numbers that could possibly complete my mother’s credit card number. This was just one of a host of idiosyncrasies that had grown more and more grating the older she got.

“Just part of getting old,” she said when I asked her about it. Getting old was something my mother seemed to have been doing ever since I could remember. It’s not that she looked old—she didn’t; and, in fact, she often got unsolicited compliments from strange men. Once, on a New York City subway, a handsome older man with a giant gold-plated crucifix on his chest and pomade in his hair stared at my mother all the way from Times Square to 110th Street. When he finally got off, he leaned close to my mother and told her she was “a very beautiful woman.” (My mother asked me to bring the story up to my father later that day. I remember my father’s faint smile when I told him.) Incidentally, that same day a man walking the opposite direction on the Broadway called my mother a “hot babe,” though I joked that from where I was standing it sounded like “old maid.”

But my mother had been getting old by collecting quirks, adding them to her repertoire and refining them through daily use. Drastic, self-performed haircuts were one thing (once she sheared off so much hair, in an attempt to see what the true color of her hair now was, that she ended up looking like Daddy Warbucks with peach fuzz); wearing her underwear to the point of disintegration was another. She also had taken to passing gas at family gatherings and ending her phone calls by shouting ‘Cheers!’ Once, after reading an article about early-onset Alzheimer’s in which these peculiarities were considered symptoms, I grew worried. But my mother was more complex, and more lucid, than I gave her credit for. These new habits had been deliberated over and added to her personality only after careful consideration. Her persona was her life’s work, in a way that it wasn’t for most people. Unusual habits were acquired, given a test-run and, if met with adequate forehead slapping from her daughters, adopted. My mother was almost willfully different from the woman in the wedding photographs I’d stumbled across. She seemed to want to elicit a more complex reaction from people, one composed of both attraction and repulsion. I was beginning to think that my mother wasn’t becoming eccentric, but instead was leaving the cheerleader and the Army wife behind.

The next morning, after waking up in our third bed and breakfast (this one called Eversley Bears, filled with hundreds of teddy bears, and run by a grumpy man named Clive), my mother and I trudged downstairs for breakfast. I’d quickly realized that my mother absolutely refused to take an English breakfast; it was too heavy. Like an idiot, though, I kept trying one every time—hoping that a pancake might appear on the plate in place of that slimy ham, or a crisp piece of bacon in the place of the boiled tomato which sat on the plate like a bloody blister. But Clive brought the plate out, set it on the table and stared at me. I cut into the sausage, which was matte and thick and the casing resisted the knife. I took a large bite out of the fried bread instead and Clive seemed satisfied.

“You look like one who’d take a big English Breakfast each morning,” he said. I cringed, and wondered what had given me away as one who inhales sausage, deep fried bread and eggs each morning. My mother was stifling a laugh. I was trying not to get upset by these side comments anymore; just the day before I’d taken my mother’s comment that I needed to watch my diet because of my “peasant build” rather well. I’d spent ten minutes in the bathroom that morning, though, searching for my hump and was happy that I hadn’t started dragging my knuckles yet.

After breakfast, I wandered into the hallway and studied the souvenir plates that hung on the walls. Teddy in Paris. Teddy in Edinburgh. Teddy in Wichita, Kansas. Then I noticed a framed black and white photograph of a uniformed Clive, shaking the Pope’s hand. The Pope appeared to be looking at the man next to Clive in the reception line. I asked my mother if we could leave for London a day early.

In London, the sky opened and reopened like a wound. My mother and I were forever ducking into cafes and waiting out sudden rain bursts. One thing that broke my ennui every once in a while was watching my mother constantly dump her clothes in London trash bins. She had been obsessed with lightening her load from the first day we arrived in England—dumping a pair of black pants at the bus station at Heathrow. I felt bad for her as I watched her claw through her clothes, her backpack open on a random bench on a railway platform or on a bus seat. She had gone to so much trouble to pack with NASA-like precision and methodology, and now the inside of her backpack looked like a Salvation Army donation bag. I knew we were getting close to the end of our journey when I saw my mother tie one of her last two pairs of underwear in a knot, and dump it in a trash bin in Russell Square. The salad days of stuffing stray shirts in crevices at railway stations were over. We were down to the bare essentials, and even those were being cast off.

The actions of this woman were hard to reconcile with the stories and photographs of the well-groomed, well-coiffed and well-mannered Bowling Air Force office main squeeze with the nice legs and the Irish Setter. I remember how shocked I’d been when my mother told me that she’d once run for Miss Bowling Air Force Base. Her best friend, Candy, had convinced her to enter the contest. She’d been one of three finalists. During the interview segment, she’d been asked what American woman she most admired. She said she admired Jacqueline Kennedy for her elegance and grace. At the time, I’m sure that seemed the appropriate answer.

Later, when my parents moved to Charleston when my father got his first job as a journalist, my mother would smoke her Menthols in a cigarette holder and pretend she was Zelda Fitzgerald. She was always the prettiest one at the party. And, she’d hoped her daughters always would be the prettiest ones at the party too, and two of them always were. I, on the other hand, disparaged that hope for many years, told my mother it was shallow and petty. I was conspicuously tomboyish and chronically date-less. I tried very hard to disappoint my mother in her hopes and did my best to let her know that I thought her expectations of me should have been of a sort different from the cheerleader and prom queen variety. Eventually, I wore her down, and she stopped expecting me to be like her in any way. When these expectations disappeared, though, I felt inexpressibly sad.

At dinner the night before we were due at Gatwick Airport for a flight home, I asked my mother how she’d liked England.

“Well,” she said, thoughtfully, “they’re stingy with ice cubes,” she said. My mother had brought this qualm up so many times during our trip that I had begun to imagine ice cubes a precious commodity.

“There next to the Crown Jewels was a single ice cube on display,” I said, and my mother laughed.

We arrived at the Underground station in time to catch the last train to Victoria Station. It seemed my mother and I were the only sober people on the platform—and I wasn’t so sure about my mother. The trip was over, I could tell by the odor in the air. It was musty and sweet—the scent of a trip nearing its end. When we sat down in the subway car, I looked at my mother, her sunglasses hiding her eyes even though it was near midnight, and wondered what she was thinking. I’d often catch my mother looking at me, seeming to study me.

“What?” I’d say.

“Nothing,” she’d reply, as if it really had been nothing. For many years, I’d assumed this clandestine staring was a critical assessment. She always denied that it was, and I never believed her; but now I wonder if it was a way of communicating something that she was afraid to say out loud to me—that she loved me, despite those rumors to the contrary. It was something she didn’t say directly to me the way she did to my sisters, to whom she was closer and around whom she felt more comfortable.

“She’s afraid of you,” my sister Lacy told me once. “Not because you’re mean, but because you don’t want to be who she is and, I think, because that’s a way of saying the things she values in life are trivial.” What I didn't tell my sister was that what she'd said was exactly the way I believed my mother felt about me.

Travel somehow made us seem less frightening to each other. Its fleeting scenes and its ephemeral moments that are of either great consequence, or none at all meant that little was set in stone. My mother and I get along better because we now think of life as that clichéd journey. Stuck at home, in the same house, it seemed we were not moving. The longer I lived away from home, the further my mother believes I’ve journeyed, and the more interesting I seem to her. But the more I get to know my mother, the more I realize that she, too, has traveled. I get the stories in snatches, tossed off as if they are unimportant details. I was Attorney General Ramsay Clarke’s secretary. I was the main breadwinner for the first five years of our marriage. The boss took me to strip clubs on my lunch break. Each trip we take together is long-overdue disclosure of secrets and of feelings. When we’re at home together, now, we are better able to continue disclosing because we’ve proven that it can be done, that it needs to be done. The spell of home is still strong, but it’s not strong enough to take away what has already been revealed to me by my mother. Understanding who my mother is, who she believes herself to be, is a gift I’ve received in installments, trip by trip. There are many places yet to visit.