There was a lot of conversation about travel, as the friends we originally met in Decatur, Illinois visited with us this past week. They now live in Tucson, Arizona but are off to Maui yet this week. Their world travels are pin-pointed on a map in their study that would be the envy of any adventure wanna-be. In the movie Stripes, Bill Murray quips to farm boy Lee Harvey after his escapades with a cow, “I want to party with you, Cowboy!” Well, I wanna travel with them. 

Now that they’ve left Portland, I now have time to tear off a few more pages from the 1,000 Places to See Before You Die calendar. It was a gift from some other Decatur friends that now live in Steamboat, Colorado. Incidentally, we actually planned this week together in Oregon wine country when all of us were reunited at Steamboat several months ago. The calendar is growing thin as the end of the year approaches, and it continues to humble me with sights that I’ve never even thought of visiting, let alone visit. Places featured like the Seychelles, Gamla Stan, Gros Morne National Park, Tuamotu Islands, Quang Nam, Manitoba, Lisbon, Temple of Heaven, Dodecanese, and Myanmar were never on my Bucket List. 

I’m sure that I don’t have the resources to travel to all these intriguing destinations, but at least now they are on my radar. I still have the basics to cover that we’ve already made plans to visit. These include Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Norway, Russia, Bali, Finland in the next year or so. After that we’ll tackle China before the money starts to run out. Honestly, there are still so many things remaining to see in the United States, including Alaska and Maine, the two states that I’ve yet to conquer. 

The calendar is also a reminder that time is short, and what you ultimately see is a factor of how long you live. No one knows when they’ll die or how. It could even be tomorrow. All I do know, is that as long as I live, I wanna continue to travel. Hopefully, I’ll have a chance to see my travel dreams come true.