Restless

I am getting restless again. I think I need a vacation. I vacationed myself out in the beginning part of this year, but I've spent a lot of time tooling around my real life, and I'm feeling like I need some time exploring another part of the universe right now. I am not one of those people who feels the need to move every year or two, I know a lot of those people. I like not moving, mostly because I hate the actual process of moving. But I love traveling, going to new places, seeing the parts of the world that I haven't seen before. I love seeing mountains and rainforests and reefs and all of the things you can't find in the greater Chicagoland area. Plus, the very idea of traveling makes me excited. I love road trips...eating junk food and listening to music as the car flies down the concrete expressway maze of America. I've spent a lot of time on planes in the past few years, so the plane thing isn't as exciting as it used to be, though I still find myself watching a plane go by over my head and wondering where it's going, and who is on it. I still love airports, though. The sense in the air that everyone is going somewhere else. Watching people de-plane in shorts and deep tans in January, and not having the heart to tell them that they will get frostbite the minute they step into the harsh Chicago winter. Wandering by the reunions happening by the baggage claim area (ah, I miss the reunions by the gate...stinking terrorists!). It's all magical to me. And getting off the plane, or getting out of the car, in a whole different place than you were when you woke up in the morning, I love that. Who knows what the day holds in this different, other place??
I haven't found my way to a continent other than North America, and I have a deep and abiding grudge about that, actually. I really want to go to Europe. And to Africa. And to Asia. Maybe to South America. Definitely to Australia. If I won the lottery, I would take two to three years to travel the world. I want to know what it looks like. And I want to stay in each place for months, not days, to get to know it fairly well before I move on to the next area (though I would probably have to come home for a time in between each jaunt, to see my family and my church and such, be renewed and refreshed). How great would that be?? There is a blog that I was reading yesterday of these two travel writers, both women, who are traveling the world for a year (tripping on words is the name of it, you could google it, I think). It's fascinating. They're climbing Everest this week. I'm not into the whole climbing Everest or Kilimanjaro thing, I hate being cold, and I really don't think risking my life over a ridiculously large crevasse is my idea of fun. But how fascinating that they are doing all of these things all over the world, getting to know people of every language, culture and nation. I feel like my world is so small, and I need to get out there and see all there is to the world.

So I am restless. I see no cure for this anytime soon. School starts next week again, and I am relentlessly busy in Chicago for the next two years. I am hoping to have a week here or a week there sometime to go somewhere. But in the meantime, I can daydream about how great it would be, bopping around the world. I hope someday that I get the opportunity to actually do it.