With my wife growing frustrated with my weekly existential crises, I have opted to share them with a wider audience (so as to hopefully dilute the annoyance factor). No, truly, I am interested in exploring the myriad possibilities of this world. In trying to formulate our plans for the future, made possibly more complicated by the relatively recent addition of a wonderful baby boy, and the unfortunate loss of my best friend a year ago, I have felt a bit adrift. What seems to stand out is a renewed wanderlust and thirst for experience, for which I have to largely thank my mother for following her Sound of Music influenced dreams of a life in Austria, and my son for finally giving me the inspiration to make the 24+ hour trip to visit her. What a wonderful place of beer, food, beauty, and friends Austria has turned out to be.
What follows I hope will be a list of places I would like to see, and how I might actually see them, as well as things I would like to do. In waiting to hear news concerning a new job, I have realized that I can not completely leave the airline industry and the benefits such a job offers for travel, but if I do leave it, I hope it will be for a job equally conducive to travel, perhaps with a bit fewer angry and/or crying people to deal with.
As an aside, I do ask forgiveness or at least a bit of tolerance for this self-indulgent enterprise. I confess that this idea has sprung from my regret at misplacing an article about an enchanting place in China. I haven’t had much interest in visiting the Far East, and with so much natural beauty to explore in Montana, I have seen little to justify excruciatingly long trips and large expenses to see natural places. But a single picture in this article took my breath away, and sadly I have no idea where this place is. I have since vowed never to forget somewhere or something that intrigues me, and I will visit at least some of them. And so they follow…
Not a Bucket 