All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes

The title for my blog was inspired by the book I am reading.  All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes is the fifth book in Maya Angelou's autobiographical series, and she wrote it while living in Accra, Ghana in the 1960's.  I will be finishing it during my travels and I enthusiastically endorse reading literature about a place you are visiting while on the trip.  You will enjoy the trip and the book so much more, and you will always remember where you were while you reading a great novel or non-fiction work this way.  Maya Angelou was in Ghana at such an interesting time, the 1960's.  Ghana was newly independent from Britain, and finding it's way.  She makes comparisons - the struggles Ghana was in the midst of, juxtaposed against the struggles back home in the U.S. for civil rights.  The movement had become volatile and it wasn't an easy road being an African-American woman/civil rights activist. In Accra she was able to enjoy life in a new nation where being black was the norm and not (as she describes it) a controversial and difficult identity.

The other reason I like my title is that I have had more trouble finding the right shoes to take on my trip than anything else.  I confess, I leave tomorrow and I still don't have a pair of sturdy walking shoes that you can dress up or down (in a light color- but not too light so they won't show all the red dust that I have learned is everywhere in Ghana).  I have one more evening and until two o'clock tomorrow.  If I find some that I am excited about I may post a photo.  If I don't you can look at my trip pictures to see how I settled.  Either way, my plane leaves Cincinnati tomorrow afternoon and I will be on my way.