When words fail

I was talking with someone at work tonight about vacation spots and favourite places to travel. When I told him that my favourite place in the country is Cape Breton he asked me to describe it, and to be honest I could hardly do it. It's green and foggy and rainy. The air is salty and the landscape is often rocky. It is just exquisitely beautiful. Whenever I think about Cape Breton I always think about boats and rough waters and weather-worn wooden buildings. And, yes, I do realize that not every part of Cape Breton is like that and the weather is not always damp (there were beautifully sunny days while we were out there too), but those are the things I think of and the things that draw me to the island. But there is something about describing places that stumps me. There is a quality to each place, I suppose you could call it an "aura" or an "energy", but that just sounds so hokey, that is completely indescibable. You have to go there to experience it. That's one of the things I love about at and photography. I think visual arts somehow manage to capture bits of the indescribable. Obviously you can't smell or feel the air, but the colours of a place, the shapes of the buildings, the lay of the land are all so important and are often captured so much more effectively in visual mediums. I love words, but sometimes they simply fall short.