It really takes a lot to impress me with beauty when it comes to scenery. I tend to be able to find beauty in most anything, mainly because I seek it and have spent my life looking for it, but to really impress me, wow me…it takes something special.
I travel a lot so I have seen many of the places featured in travel brochures or National Geographic calendars – either from the ground, experiencing it (like the fjords of Norway and beaches of Costa Rica), or from the air, flying over it (like Mt. Everest and Cuba).
I think I'm such a beauty snob because I grew up in some fairly remarkable places – central British Columbia, the Pacific Northwest (US), Montana…
And then, because of my parents' chosen profession, I got to see a lot of the world before I had even graduated high school – the Eiffel Tower, Bangkok, the Swiss Alps, pineapple plantations in Ghana. And so on.
I was thinking about this the other day on a bus somewhere in the mountains in central America. As we wove through the jungle, I saw a sign for a tourist hotel, then the hotel's view over a valley, in a bit of fog lit by the colors of the setting sun.
And I thought, "That's pretty. And some tourists will read about that hotel online, or in a book, and they'll travel here, and it will be their vacation spot, and they'll tell all their friends about it back home, and everybody will be jealous and exclaim "Oh! That's so beautiful!" And yet, for here, it's pretty average. Unremarkable. Almost…boring – if you consider what's within an hour drive…"
I know I'll never run out of places in God's great creation to get lost in wonder and fascination, to be simply blown away and mesmerized by incredible beauty.
It's just that I am more selective now about what qualifies as top-level beautiful scenery.