and so has JB. We were traveling souls long before we knew each other. Now that we know each other (and okay, that's been a while now), sometimes we travel together sometimes we travel apart. This week we're doing a bit of both, as he's been in Singapore on business (he took the picture below of a restaurant there, where he ate/drank satay and stingrays, or something like that. The people he was meeting with there wanted to take him to a many-starred restaurant, but he wanted to eat where the locals ate on a regular basis. (This may damn well be why sometimes traveling apart is sometimes a good thing for JB's wife, who woulda gone with the many stars. I'm just sayin'...)
Anyway, he's almost home now - actually, after a few hour stopover in Tokyo earlier today, or whenever it was there - and in a few days we are on our way, together, up to Maine. It's a business trip for me, extended for a couple of days so we can look around a bit.
Hope you all are fine where you are!
Thursday, October 8, 2009
I've always liked to go...
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17 comments:
I often prefer the travelling to the arriving. There's something kind of liberating about not being anywhere in particular...
We're spread out all over the place, aren't we, as a group?
Kinda like...the world.
I love travelling but I don't get to do enough of it. Maybe that's why I walk in circles round my living room holding up picture postcards every 10th circuit.
That bar looks like a cool sort of place — where lithe middle aged men wrestle on a small raised plinth to entertain the diners?
Hope you have fun on your travels.
We're much more stay at home. I don't much enjoy travelling although being new places is fine - it's just getting there I don't much like.
Yeah. I'm with FHH. The getting there is a pain, but the being there is wonderful.
Hope you have a great time in Maine!
We are an interesting group of global friends. I think I'm going to travel through time and dig out my picture postcards from the early 1900's. Thanks for the idea, WO.
I'm with Ril on the traveling part. I actually enjoy layovers in unfamiliar airports. I've convinced everyone I know that my cell phone doesn't work inside terminals.
How do you score a business trip to Maine? Does this have to do with the whole climate change thing? I was in Sacramento yesterday and will be in Minneapolis on Monday night. I'd like to go to Maine, though.
I actually like both the traveling and the being in new places. I'm pretty much happy just wherever I am, though not if I have to stay there a very, very long time. Unless there's beer or wine and either (a) very good people-watching or (b) good company. (Like the Giraffe. I could have stayed there for days.)
(I mean the Giraffe as in that place we met in London. Not as in "a giraffe is good company." I've actually never spoken with a giraffe. Well, not knowingly. I've talked with lots of call center people, and really when you think about it, I've got no proof that they weren't giraffes.)
So far on this comment trail, we have Japan, England, England, California, Florida, California and me, Virginia. And lots of us are transplanted from other places.
That checkerboard lifestyle is one of the things that makes life worth living for me. JB and I laugh and say we could live in hotel rooms here and there and be happy as hell. But our kids wouldn't like it, us being purposefully homeless and all, even though they aren't themselves homeless, so there ya go.
When we go on trips and I say 'I'm tired, let's go home for a while', I say that without even thinking about it, and JB never wonders what I mean, because he knows what I mean is 'let's go back to the hotel for a while.'
Do you guys ever think about your ancestors, and wonder about them wishing they could leave for somewhere? I have this image in my mind of a woman of indeterminate age, and she's always working out in a field (because, yeah, she's no lady, unless they called worker-bee peasants 'lady', back in the day in Ireland) and anyway...she's looking out across the land and thinking (in whatever passed for
19th century Irish nasty-talk) "I wanna get the fuck outta here." Of course, the good old famine came along and helped, sorta, but you see my point. My father was restless as hell, and couldn't do much about it. He talked about how his father was the same way, always wishing he could leave (and this was only a generation or so after they'd gotten to Kentucky in the first place). I never did hear about the women, though. And I think that has to be because they just didn't mention they were wanting to leave all along.
P.S. I'm in the camp with the at of traveling often being better than the getting there. Once you're there, you're there, so...
Thats' act of traveling, not 'at' of traveling, by the way...
Hey, Pete, I'm with ya. that Giraffe day could've lasted a lot lot longer and I'd have loved it. That day was set apart from regular time wasn't it?
Hah. Now you've got a comment from Illinois.
I like to travel, but it's hell on my sinuses. I always get a little sick. But I do enjoy it, all the same. Wish I could do it more. I've never been outside the states, and I've never been to New England, a place I've always wanted to visit.
You know, I think I'd love traveling more if it didn't involve flying. My body doesn't like all that pressurizing and depressurizing. Not to mention leaving the driving up to someone I don't see until we land.
I often think about buying the RV and seeing the World - one continent at a time (even Antarctica, but not with the RV).
Between you lovely people and a couple of other groups I'm a part of (yes, I'm three timing you guys), I have friends everywhere.
Do you guys ever think about your ancestors, and wonder about them wishing they could leave for somewhere?
In 3rd grade here, my kids had to do a heritage project. One of their tasks was to interview a grandparent. It turns out that my mother's grandfather walked from Lithuania to Portugal so he could get on a boat to America. I think his brother walked with him, and they did odd jobs along the way. He arrived in the US with about five dollars and pretty much nothing else. I still wonder what it must have been like, walking from Lithuania to Portugal.
WOW! What a brilliant thread. You guys are so interesting. I could listen to you forever.
Sorry i haven't been by recently Robin and thanks for the message you left on my blog. I hadn't checked in there in a while. just getting my head around being a worker bee again (BTW I imagine your ancestor would've blessed herself and said "Jesus, Mary and Joseph, gerrus ourra this feckin' hell." Or something similar. Then she'd have prayed for forgiveness because all Irish people profane liberally but then we feel guilty about it!)
I'm a strange mix because i definitely have an itinerant soul but I'm also a real home bod. I have longings to see places. I just hope one day my pocket book will allow me to do it.
I loved Maine when I visited. It was during the fall and the weather was fine. I had a romantic idea of seeing the Atlantic from the other side to the one I grew up with but the day I went to the beach the fog was so thick I couldn't see more than a foot into the ocean, standing on its edge. It smelt good though. I love the sea air.
Are you going to meet up with WW while you're there??
"I wanna get the fuck outta here."
I know for a fact my great-great grandfather said this, but he wasn't in another country. He was in the state pen for moonshining.
My favorite traveling usually involves driving on my own with nowhere in particular to be or go. That's one problem with Hawaii. Oahu's less than 30 miles across.
I've been to Deer Isle, Maine, which was nice. Enjoy the leaves.
Last night on ESPN they showed highlights from the "Wife Carrying" contest being held in Maine. Is that what you were in Maine for?
Cool.
Did you win?
We got back last night, and I'm whooped, people. Whooped. But happy. Or I was, anyway, until I went into the office today...
So I'm getting ready to post a quick pic, and then I'll post something later in the week, when my brain un-mushes.
Meanwhile, happy Wednesday, you all!
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