And have a freakin’ blast in Italy! (Envy oozing out of every pore here.)

But have fun! FLorence is awesome.

My personal current fantasy travel destination is Mongolia. I want to take the Trans-Siberian railroad from Moscow, spend a week reading the classic Russian authors on the train, spend some time at Lake Baikal and then travel onto the steppes. Umm, yeah, still waiting for that lottery ticket to come through. :-)

Mostly due to monetary concerns, much of my travel during my lifetime has been within the UK. Not that we don’t have some very nice spots to visit, but I’d like to go further afield if and when time and money permit. I’ve done Dublin for a couple of weeks, which was cool – interesting literary history, because I’m very into Irish writers – my one lament now over going back there being that Bewley’s tearooms have closed down (sob!) I had weekends in both Paris and Amsterdam when I was at school, and I’d like to see both of them again, for longer, and without the illicitly-drunken shenanigans that invariably accompanied school trips. I’d also like to do the Edinburgh Fringe again, sans the bitch queen director who made it a misery for me and a bunch of actors in ’94.

The past few years, we’ve been headed for Seattle simply because we’ve been checking it out as a possible place to live – eventually – and I keep getting nagged to look at other parts of the US. I’d like to check out NY myself, but my husband is a little bit wary of it – just too many tall buildings for his taste. I’d quite like to take a gap year that would involve Mardi Gras in New Orleans, fall in New England generally, Halloween in Salem MA, Christmas in New York and whatever places look interesting (including Portland and Taos NM somewhere along the line) in between. But that’s for when we win the lottery.

And there’s also Tuscany, Barcelona, Iceland, Cappadocia in Turkey, various now way too dangerous other parts of the Middle East, Tibet, India, Bali and probably tons of other places I’ve forgotten.

Sweetmachine, honey, the best vacation is yourself, 1 other person you really like, a stack of books, and a few bottles of wine. Everything else will take care of itself.

Erin, give me a shout if you decide on the trip to Ireland – I’ll take you for a beer.

I’m going to work on that.

I know how hard it is to do this in grad school because of time and money, but if you get the chance, it’s one of the most freeing things in the world to just say “I want to go to X place” and then just GO. I know that if I go somewhere because I WANT to go somewhere, and my only obligation is to make myself happy, I generally end up having an awesome trip. Of course, it’s great if it’s somewhere far away that you’ve never heard of, but even a few days at a location a few hours down the road can be great.

Anyway, it’s only after I bought the plane ticket and started looking for clothes that I started to freak out about being a fat American in Europe. It’s my first trip outside of the U.S. and Canada, and I pretty much wear jeans and silly T-shirts/sweatshirts every day here. My friend says I’ll be fine in my normal clothes over there, but everything else I’ve read disagrees (we’re both engineers, so it doesn’t really matter what we wear).

I suppose if I can’t find anything comfortable that I like at the mall before I go, it’s all moot. :)

I’m going to work on that.