It was good to get home Sunday evening. Remember what that pigtailed gal with the doggie said to Auntie Em? “There’s no place like home!”

Of course there are always places more majestic than home. More intriguing, more evocative. We saw plenty of them on my just-ended Old World Europe tour—a signature route for me that begins in Warsaw and continues through Krakow, Budapest, Vienna, and Prague.

Along the way, we scaled the heights of beauty: glittering palaces, majestic cathedrals, historic castles, and a gorgeous passageway across the Carpathian Mountains. But equally we studied the legacy of human depravity: Auschwitz-Birkenau, remnants of Jewish ghettos, stark monuments that mark the squares where ethnic massacres and deportations to death camps took place. Old World Europe is not a gentle route designed for relaxation.

Accordingly, the people who sign up for Old World Europe are pretty special. Not surprisingly, they tend to be well traveled (this region isn’t usually a person’s first venture out of the US). Also not surprisingly, some arrive with a dread of “group travel.” But quickly that dread goes out the window. For starters, these fellow travelers understand and value the national treasures enfolded within the name “The Smithsonian Institute.” That fact alone provides a common thread for each  group. In addition, travel that so clearly emphasizes education tends to foster a spirit of discussion and strong bonds. Within days, our “group” transforms into a family. We’re on the road, but we feel at home.

Still, for me, there’s no place like home. Home, where the laundry lies; home where the papers languish; home, where the garden’s weedy, . . . sorry, I had a Simon-and-Garfunkle moment. Our home has changed its address four times in recent years, but it doesn’t matter. One’s kitchen table remains one’s kitchen table.

Beyond that, this weekly essay has become a kind of home for me, and, most kindly, for many of you. Your comments made here or sent in emails add delight to my life. Your stories prove once again the power of our common human experience.

While flying home from Prague on Sunday, I found myself wondering “how did my blog get started?” I could not recall. Because he numbers them, it’s easy to say that Hank’s terrific Friday Performance Picks started 242 weeks ago (!) and have, rightly so, gained a big audience along the way. But when did I start writing regularly here?

So I looked back. My initial posts were designed around our first course (our signature course), Discovering Music, and addressed musical and artistic style. But in one early post, I invoked the idea of home through the lens of learning.

Is not home what we remember when we examine our childhood education? The cushion we lolled over when we puzzled out the words in our early readers? The creak of our desk chair as we blinked our eyes over those first exercises in arithmetic? And what about the smell of dinner as a welcome interruption from our too-hard ninth-grade history book? Hey, back then, the textbooks were hard!

Not everyone has happy memories of learning, though. Often on my tours I hear stories related by my travelers—poignant stories that stretch back six or seven decades, yet are filled with pain. Sometimes these stories involve childhoods where passionate interests or strong talents were arbitrarily or heartlessly discouraged. Other travelers tell of situations where straightened circumstances simply did not allow a continuation of their education.

But other travelers narrate stories similar to mine. They memorialize extraordinary teachers back in an era when the majority of teachers were women who, today, would be doctors, professors, or corporate leaders. Back then, however, the only forum available for their gifts was the public-school classroom. So into their squirmy, barely formed charges they poured everything they had, changing our future in the process.

If you have a moment, for fun I invite you to return with me to 2009, and what might even have been my first essay on this site. Goodness gracious, we’re now in our tenth year! A decade of work that seems, frankly, like an instant.

And yet, over those years, countless blessings have come. We hope our materials have aided you, and it seems they have. And we continue to be uplifted and inspired by all that you do in our urgent mutual mission to restore the standards of education and cherish together our Western cultural heritage.