The Armchair Traveler

My car is an absolute disaster. If Goodwill had a clearance section, I imagine it would look a lot like the pile of junk in the back of my little Accord Wagon. What I dread most is having new passengers. At least my friends, the frequent fliers, know what to expect. They've mastered the subtle technique of getting the broken doorhandles to work. They anticipate the sound of an obnoxious crying baby when I put it in reverse. They know that the Dunkin Donuts coffee in the cup holder is old enough to be a bio-hazard. The new passengers have no idea what they're getting themselves into. To make matters worse, they're unfailingly polite about it. It kills me.

Let's face it, a person's car says a lot about his or her place in the world. Obviously mine is not the vehicle of the financially secure. I'm sure there was never a good time, economically speaking, to be an indebted graduate student in music, particularly one with lofty ambitions to travel the [entire] world in some sort of nebulous "writer" capacity. But this morning, driving my death-trap to campus and thinking about the article I read over coffee about our country's dire financial situation, I had trouble imagining a worse time.

Waaa-Waaaah

Actually, I'm an optimist. Or something. Economies are failing, wars are raging, the planet might be dying, and I can't even afford basic cable. I'm sure, though, that it will all magically work out and in a couple years time I'll be happily trekking in the Australian Bush or watching the Northern Lights in the remote Arctic or running from lions in the Serengeti (and coming home to HBO On-Demand, of course). In the meantime, the best I can do is come here to write about the places I have seen, the places I hope to see, and the places I might never see outside the pages of my National Geographic.

Come back soon and maybe we'll go here...

...or here...
...or maybe even here...