Travel Update for 2024

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. To quote John Lennon, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” Suffice it to say that for the past several months, life hasn’t been easy. Of course, I’m hardly unique in that regard, we all experience difficult times. It’s true for life and true for traveling. When our journey doesn’t follow the carefully constructed plan, we can find ourselves lost, confused, or frustrated. We will sometimes become tired, hungry, sick, overwhelmed, stressed, and even scared. There are so many things that we can’t control and when things go wrong all we can really do is pause, take a deep breath, and focus on finding a workable solution. Then regroup, move forward and embrace the adventure of the unknown. The reward for perseverance could be an amazing new experience or even an entirely new direction in life.

Given the challenges of the past few years, it's definitely time for me to regroup. For as long as I can remember I’ve dreamt about spending a year or two traveling the world. During the pandemic, my hobby became researching the possibility. Where would I go? What would it cost? How would I handle insurance, medications, physical limitations, packing, loneliness? How far in advance should I plan my itinerary? Would it be possible to take on some freelance work while traveling? Three years and hundreds of hours of research and I haven’t found an answer to every question, but I’ve figured out enough to get started and on New Year’s Eve, my journey will begin.

On December 31, 2023, I will board an American Airlines Boeing 777-200 from Reagan National Airport to Buenos Aries, Argentina. From there I will spend five weeks exploring South America before meeting up with my sisters and niece in Puerto Rico for a long-ago planned winter getaway. After that, well, I have lots of ideas, but nothing finalized just yet. The plan is to make the best use of frequent flier miles and stick to locations where the US dollar goes a long way. I will be documenting my travels on my blog and would invite you all to subscribe and follow me on my solo trek around the world. If reading isn’t really your thing, you can follow me on social media where I promise to post lots of pictures, reels, and video stories.

I’ll be spending the remainder of 2023 getting things in order and enjoying the holidays with family and friends. Before leaving the country, I hope to publish a few posts about travel planning and maybe sneak in an article or two about some of my favorite December travel destinations so please subscribe to be notified of new content. If you have any recommendations for must see locations, please share in the comments and they may end up on my ever-growing list of 2024 destinations.