A Lifetime of Inspiration - and a Guide

The more immediate justification for beginning this blog is clearly an upcoming trip to Southeast Asia in May that I'm planning to take with my 22yo nephew, Erik, and my desire to have some easy way of sharing progress updates with family and friends.

But the broader inspiration is probably the decades worth of faded, yellow National Geographic magazines that sat on the white wooden shelves of our basement in the Philadelphia suburb where I grew up, tantalizing me as a kid to imagine I could ever be so fortunate as to visit these places that I saw on page after page, issue after issue of this magazine.

Faded Sets of National Geographics

And what images they were!  Of wondrous and colorful states like Vermont, with its glorious Fall colors, rolling green hills, pumpkin harvests and tree-tapping systems for maple production.  Of exotic locales like New Guinea, with its tribal, ashen-painted families that seemed straight out of the stone age.  Of underseas worlds and exotic rubber plantations, jungle civilizations and Alpine yodelers, ice blue glaciers and hellishly spouting volcanoes.  What journeys I took in that basement!
   

A few years later, I started to fulfill my personal dream of traveling and seeing some of these amazing sites.  This started with my first plane ride at age fourteen; from Philadelphia to Chicago to visit my cousins.  Soon after, I experienced the excitement of being awarded an American Field Service (AFS) scholarship at age sixteen, and spending a summer in Peru.  Upon graduation from college, I enjoyed a summer abroad touring England, Scotland, France and Ireland with my best friend in college: hitchhiking from town to town, and busking (playing guitar) in the streets of Galway, Ireland, to help defray living expenses.  And finally, the culmination of a decade of international travel with an invitation, at age twenty seven, to become an expatriate based out of the Geneva, Switzerland European headquarters of my Boston-based employer.

But having developed a marketing temperament in conjunction with my growing business expertise through the years, I was particularly happy when I one day stumbled upon the "Special Collector's Issue" of National Geographic, pictured below, in an airport book stall.

What luck!  A guidebook for a proposed lifetime of travel; and one that my old "friends" at National Geographic had put together with people like me in mind!

1999 Special Collector's Issue

It's really this magazine, which proposes the "50 Places of a Lifetime" that one should visit, that is the inspiration for this blog.  

For I've now committed, in my mid-fifties and in conjunction with my husband, Mike, to checklist as many of these sites as I can.

There'll be more on this later, but the good news is that life has been fortunate to me, and I've already experienced the joy of visiting some of these places, and will look forward to sharing my impressions, stories and perhaps some old photos with you of these wonderful places already visited.

But it's with great anticipation that I now formally begin my journey to seeing the others!