I wasn’t planning to use this blog to talk about myself, really. I was planning to use it to talk about ideas and fun stuff and terrible stuff and other stuff. You know. Stuff.
But I’ll make this a sort of exception.
I’ve just more or less stumbled on the Web site of a guy who still exists on my company’s intranet, but who has taken a year out to travel with his family. That’s 4 kids and two adults, in places like Vietnam, India, and Namibia.
How can you not be impressed?
Usually, I avoid “we’re traveling†sites, because they always produce one or more of the following feelings in me:
1. Massive, unstoppable, heartache-inducing jealousy.
2. Massive, unstoppable, heartache-inducing nostalgia for my own travel days. (Even though I came home when I wanted to and don’t really want to go out again right now.)
3. Contempt for the people doing the traveling, because they won’t be out there as long as I was, or stay in all the cool places I did, or live with the locals the way I did, or get off the tourist track as much as I did. Of course, all this is powered solely and completely by #1 and #2 above.
4. Recognition that they’re doing it right now. When I came home for short visits, I’d occasionally run into someone who told me that they, too, did some traveling. And I’d engage them in conversation, but I didn’t really care much, because their ancient trip wasn’t relevant to me. Now my trip is ancient (I got home in 1999), and no current traveler (or anyone else!) wants to hear my tales.
5. Recognition that their Web site is so well-done and compelling and fun, whereas the one I put up when I got home is old-looking, ugly, hard to figure out, incomplete, and generally an embarrassment. I won’t even link to it from here.
Yes, you may notice that not one of those feelings is, “hey, great for you!†That’s because I’m a bad man.
But I’m linking to this one, and I’m gonna check it out fairly often. For whatever reason, it doesn’t produce those feelings in me as much as others have. (Maybe it’s because they brought their kids along, so it’s not something I did, but something I could do in the future? Or maybe because the site is SO good that it’d be ridiculous to compare mine to it.)
And the little girl is just too cute.
See six in the world.
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