You can spend the better part of your life being satisfied with summer vacations to visit family, taking your kids to Disney or DC, and the occasional beach vacation get-away. Then an extraordinary opportunity presents itself, and you’re in full-blown addiction.
For me that opportunity came in the winter of 1994. A family member bought a partnership in a vacation house in Italy…sight unseen. She called me to tell me about it and to suggest that we go check it out for my birthday. We flew into FCO, picked up a rental car at the airport, and headed straight into the central Umbrian countryside. I drove, she navigated. I feel in love. In love with rural Italy and more importantly with travelling.
A travel addiction develops rapidly and its grip is unbreakable. Each trip fuels the hunger for another. Two weeks makes you crave three weeks. Three weeks is no longer good enough when you know that a month is a possibility. Ninty of the items on your “101 Things” list are trips. Your collection of DK travel guides and your atlases of other countries take center stage on your desk. Your Google search history is filled with discount airfare web sites. You spend hours every week on the SlowTalk message boards. You start thinking of the people you ‘meet’ there as dear friends.
You begin to view your bank accounts as your travel fund. Every dollar you spend on anything but, feels like a dollar misspent.
And that brings me to the name of this blog. It could have been “Old Cars – New Trip” or “Old Dishwasher – New Trip”. We’ve made the conscious decision to invest in travel instead of things.
My next entry will be a recap of our travel history since 1994. Then I’ll get on with the business of documenting our planning for our next major trip – The month of June 2007 to Spain and Portugal.