When you leave your cosy little corner where most folks either agree with you or, regardless, possess mostly similar understandings of what the world is like, you learn stuff.

Mark Twain wrote in Innocents Abroad an almost precise expression of what was on my mind during most of our recent journey.

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”