Introduction

By way of introduction, allow me first to tell you my twin dreams:  someday in the future, I want to spend two years doing nothing but traveling.  One year would be spent solely in the United States.  In the second year, I would travel around the world.  These may, in the end, turn out to be nothing more than pie in the sky, but as the saying goes, failing to plan is planning to fail.  On the one hand, there's no doubt that doing either would be incredibly expensive.  I haven't actually worked out the costs yet, but maybe I will in a coming post.  But until the day actually comes for me to hit the road, my intention is to use this blog as a catalog of the travels I have made, the places that grab me, and anything else travel related that strikes my fancy.  I expect this means a little bit of bumpiness until I find my "voice", as they say.

A little about myself:  I consider myself to be reasonably well traveled.  I've only visited two continents (Europe and North America), but I've visited around a dozen different countries.  My travel style tends to be "closer to the ground" if you will - I don't have funds to stay in high end hotels, and I've done most of my traveling with children, which tends to prohibit such extravagances.  I enjoy a variety of things when traveling, but shopping is not really one of them.  I don't tend to like shopping when I'm at home, so spending time shopping away from home doesn't hold that much appeal for me.  I do enjoy sightseeing, although I'm beginning to appreciate more and more the "anti-sightseeing" approach to travel (maybe more on that later).  I tend to seek out experiences rather than souvenirs.  The more I travel, the more that I find this to be true.

I feed my travel bug with small trips locally when I can, and bigger trips once every few years.  I also read multiple travel magazines, as well as various travel books.  I tend to start dreaming about the next trip not too long after the last one is over, and find myself searching out travel guides to help me plan.  If nothing else, I tend to be a meticulous planner.  I imagine that in former days, I could have made an excellent travel agent, if for no other reason than I love the aspect of planning and writing about travel.  Eventually, who knows, maybe I can draft a few articles for the magazines that I currently read.  At one point, I thought about trying to make a go of it in travel writing, but from what I can tell, you have to have the money to travel before you write, and the writing doesn't actually earn you enough to pay for the travel.  Maybe I'm wrong on this, but let's just say I'm not about to quit my day job to give it a try.

I had several thoughts about how best to start (and still do).  I had thought about going through books such as 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, and making notes about whether or not I had been there, whether I wanted to go there, etc., but honestly, I'm not sure whether that's allowable, given that the book is copyrighted, and I'm also not sure if it's the best way to feed travel lust.  I had also thought about simply starting by cataloging my past travels, which might give me some time to build up some other ideas and thoughts.  There's travel app reviews, travel guide ideas, the list goes on.

In the end, I think I am going to start with recaps of past travels, as much to give me time, as well as to capture some of the things that seem to be the most appealing to me when I travel. I won't catalog every trip, but at least major ones.  If you're reading, please be patient.