Travelogic

Discounting two brief trips into Canada (one to Toronto for MLA, one last month en route to C&W), I've only actually been out of the country twice. The first was my junior year in college, where I spent a term in Ireland, and the second came while I was at ODU, when I went to the Digital Arts & Culture conference when it was in Bergen, Norway.

There are many people who love (LOVE) travel, and their metric seems to be a list of all the really cool and wacky places they've been. Which is fine, I suppose. But I measure a place less by the place itself, I think, and more first by the getting there and second by the people I'm there with. There are some incredible places to experience out there in the world, I'm sure, but that's not what I'm talking about when I myself claim to love travel. My single best traveling experience ever was the trip I took back in Fall 2004, where I was just driving from place to place, visiting friends, stopping for pictures, singing along to mix CDs, and logging miles. Good times, seriously.

Not that I'm averse to traveling the wide world (although I am fairly averse to the aeroplane). It's just that the thing I like about travel is the way it can lift you out of the everyday, and for me that means no schedules, light planning, and seeing where the road takes you. Makes me smile to think about it.