Traveling again

It has been three years since I started this blog.  It began because I was unemployed and starting off on a long road trip and I thought some of you might want to come along.  Since then it has been a soap box for dozens of topics other than travel: food, books, movies, states of mind, mindless states, whining, winning, wining and dining, joy and sorrow, the profound and the mundane.  Sometimes no one reads it, sometimes a few people do.  That's fine. I write it because I want to. 

Before the blog, when I would travel, I would send emails out to a list of people and some would read those emails.  Again, I liked writing about where I was, and those travels spanned continents and countries.  The other day I started making a list of the countries I have visited in my life and the count was close to 20.  And I realized that the last time I got on an airplane to go somewhere foreign was in January 2009.  By the end of that year I was out of a job and thus the road trip became my escape.  Europe was out of the question.  I also realized that travel is something I love.  Lots of people like traveling, true.  But for me it goes farther than just liking to travel.  I love it.  (Except for the airplane flights, those are not my favorite part.)  I have never minded living out of a suitcase.  I don't mind being an outsider and not knowing the language.  I like strange and new food, as long as it isn't moving and doesn't have 8 legs that I am supposed to crunch on.  As my friend Jani once explained, I don't have time for jet lag so I don't let it get in my way.

It has been far too long since I took a really good trip.  Five years this January...... way too long.  So I am now planning a new adventure.  The small hotel I work at is closed the first two weeks of December, the perfect time for me to get out of Dodge.  My bank account says otherwise but I am not listening to that stodgy old thing.  It's why we have savings accounts: to provide for emergencies.  This is one.

Where to go?  I considered all the old favorites and started looking at air fares.  It costs about $1000 now to go anywhere. Paris was calling me, it's been years since I visited my favorite European city, but I know me. I know that if I go to Paris alone I will do what I always do in Paris: see the sites, walk a lot and read a lot of books.  I can do that anywhere.  Rome, the same thing would happen.  I love those two cities but it is time to get out of my foreign comfort zone and break the travel mold.  My everyday life is so staid and so boring in so many ways that I decided to do something risky.  Something that involves a new country.

Where?  I'll tell you tomorrow.  Tune in.  And follow along.