FYI:
When you swan dive into a preemptive midlife crisis, shuck all responsibility and begin planning an undeniably self indulgent trip (“I.E. How Erica ‘Found Herself’ in Timbuktu, Again in Jordan and Amazingly, Yet Again in India. Sigh.”) everyone claims they want to be on your e-mail list.
They throw out the request in bars and church and on street corners when you part, with admirable enthusiasm and good intentions – like rose petals and rice sweetly consecrating your adventure.
Maybe it’s sincere generosity, maybe morbid curiosity. Either way, it’s undoubtedly a concept that is better in theory than in practice.
See, “Add me to your e-mail list” is one of those things you just feel like you should say. Like “I’ll totally come and see the baby as soon as it’s born” or “Let me know if you need any help painting” or “You call day or night – whatever it takes to get you through this break-up!”
But then one day — when your taxes are due in two hours and twelve minutes, or your son won’t stop performing disturbingly heartfelt renditions of the hits of “Rent”, or your girlfriend mentions for the fourteenth time how funny that new guy in the office is – my sunshiny, philosophical dispatches from the road are going to push you over the edge.
And there I will be — halfway through my trip, nursing a bad case of typhoid and homesickness in some cyber café/massage parlor in Kampala. Logging on to find my hotmail account bloated with bitter “unsubscribe” notices from my acquaintances and ADD friends who thought “You’d better add me to your e-mail list!” was just an expression.
So in everyone’s best interest, I up and made myself a blog. That’s right my friends – I’ve joined the technologeneration. I’m practically Bill Gates.
My periodic reports are sure to feature sanctimonious observations and dramatic metamorphoses that will trigger sprain inducing eye rolls. Seriously folks – we’re talking uninformed commentary on international politics, selective outrage at human rights violations, increasingly less-subtle condemnation of “bourgeois Americans,” Pollyanaesque descriptions of the world’s natural wonders….
And no one deserves to have that much self indulgent drama thrown on them unexpectedly.
You need to prepare. Pray for patience, numb yourself with a stiff shot of something cloudy and old, send the kids to bed. And when you’re fully braced for melodrama, visit the blog. I’ll try to update every couple of weeks or so, depending on internet access (ok, depending on the ebbs and flows of my laziness).
And now, to the point (SEE, I told you there’d be rambling! But now I don’t have to feel guilty, because you chose to come and read this. Sucker.) :
I fly out of Minneapolis next Wednesday, December 28th. The first leg of the trip is what I like to call “Soaking up last bits of luxury about which I will dream when I have bed bugs and am subsisting on flat bread and iodine laced water. Mmmmmmm.”
The plan is to split a week and a half between Paris and Venice and then meet up with my best friend to conquer Spain and Morocco for the next three or four weeks.
After Christine leaves me to my own slip shod devices and poor judgment in Morocco, the loose itinerary is West Africa in February, East Africa in March and on up to Egypt and the Middle East after that.
I hope to make it over to India and Nepal around June — barring being sold into white slavery or detained in a Pakistani penal colony.
Though if either of those unexpected adventures crops up, I’ll be sure to add you to my e-mail list!
