I have the most vivid memories from my childhood of my great aunt, Jeanette, telling me and my sister stories of her travels after World War 2 around the world as a schoolteacher on U.S. military bases. She traveled everywhere (as a single woman in the 50s and 60s) that I dream of going today. As a young child, the stories that made the biggest impact on my life were those of her time in Japan.
While I was browsing my favored geography/travel news related outlets this morning, I happened upon a slideshow of the new UNESCO world heritage sites for this year. I used to pay a lot more attention to the UNESCO lists than I do today – when I was younger, UNESCO’s curated lists seemed to apply more to my travel style than they do now. That said, looking through the list of 2015 inscriptions was a bit surprising to me – included were several places I would have never thought of as being UNESCO World Heritage material.
I hit a travel rut around 2012. In 2011 I had hit my peak stride in terms of travel – I went on a solo trip across Mongolia, led a trip of business students around Korea, and could afford all of it easily thanks to a high paying job in the tech sector. A series of unfortunate events (yet ultimately positive in the grand scheme of things) set my life into a rather sizeable slump that took me several years to recover from.
Needless to say, I travel when I want to celebrate freedom and independence – and I didn’t feel it from 2011-2013. The last thing I wanted to do was to celebrate myself, so I spent a lot of thos years wallowing, and figuring my shit out. Ultimately, I met my now fiance David, changed teams at work, and built a new group of peers whose interests are more aligned with my own – those events gave me a bit of a kickstart. 2014 rolled around, and I figured it was time to get my groove back.
I am recently engaged. On our last trip (in Istanbul, Turkey and the South Caucasian nations of Georgia and Armenia), I proposed to my soon to be husband David. What’s more exciting about the marriage and party, however, is clearly the honeymoon. I’ve never been one to care at all about the romantic implications of a wedding ceremony, and have certainly been to enough of them to know what I do and don’t like, and so David and I have used travel as an excuse to not really have a wedding ceremony at all – instead we’re putting some of that dough toward the honeymoon of our dreams and a lot toward paying down the principal owed on our house.
