Welcome! This blog is about traveling and filling life with experiences because that makes me happy and maybe it will make other people happy too. I have lived in 3 countries and visited over 39 in the latter part of my life. Until then, I lived in the same town, the same house, in the same room, for 18 years.
In a nutshell, my travel timeline looks something like this:
I am a pragmatist and a stickler for details. I love planning adventures almost as much as I love going on them and I have planned countless personal trips, as well as offsite business meetings and incentive events for companies I’ve worked for. Not to mention all the travel I’ve booked for C-Suite execs in their quest for world domination.
In this blog I hope to share with you tips and ideas on traveling and also share stories about my traveling missteps and cultural snafus so that you can learn from my mistakes. Or at least laugh at them.
One of my favorite scenes from the movie Amelie is when she puts her hand deep into a barrel of beans (or dried corn or something) just to get a little thrill out of feeling their slipperiness around her hand. For me, that’s the perfect embodiment of travel: the little thrills, the simple pleasures, the off-the-beaten-path and personal kind of triumphs. The sorts of memories that get written on your soul, not on facebook.
Other things that make me happy are:
- BRIAN – the awesome wonderful amazing man I am married to. My best friend, partner in every adventure and my soul mate.
- My totally sweet, cute, anthropomorphized shih-tzu/havanese dog, Barkley. Who, in addition to killing it as a snuggly wonder-pet, moonlights as the owner of an underground canine slam poetry venue called the Bartling Word.
- Sleep. Does anyone remember that song “These Dreams” by the band Heart? This is what sleeping means to me.
- Massages. One of the only things I like more than eating.
- Food. There are doughnut trees growing in the ice cream soil of my heart.
Traveling offers so many different experiences and it’s my firm belief that experience is what makes a long life and a life worth living.
I love this quote from John Steinbeck’s East of Eden:
It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable…[but] it is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy – that’s the time that seems long in the memory…Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.
So, shall we set down some posts and start draping?