Regrets, Remediation, and Cream Soda

I'm very happy that I was able to travel overseas last year. It's seven months on and I don't think I've lost any of my excitement that the trip built up. Now I actually find bits of nostalgia and longing for that foreign yet familiar land popping into my head. I rather wish it was sensible to go back. Or cheap. I'd live over there, in England, if I could. I believe living abroad would be the greatest adventure of a lifetime. Especially in a place where other cultures are simply a train ride away. You don't see things like that in the "good ol'" USA. I know in my heart that I'll live abroad at some point in my life. I don't know when, and I think it might just be at a completely random time. I'll just go insane from the doldrum one day and fly to an unknown destination to settle in.

Part of me has a sinister urge to just throw caution to the wind and embark on a round-the-world journey. Yet I'm in control enough to know that such an endeavour is ridiculous and impossible. I don't have nearly enough money to do something so grand. I'm not worldly enough to be able to make an adventure like that work, either.

I'm not committed enough to blogging to make it worthwhile either. I'm all about the experience, personally, but for the sake of everyone else I'd need to blog. I'm not very good at archiving the events of my own life, sadly. Blogs, pictures, videos, and serialized adventures are usually absent from the accounts of my life. Even in London I was unable to fully catalogue the week in any memorable way. The Ashes created our London scrapbook and took hundreds of pictures. I took maybe 200 pictures and three videos. Yes, three whole videos. In hindsight I should've bought a new memory card and probably a video camera. I should've bought a video camera for the trip and then returned it.

Still, though, this type of documentation of the trip comes with another problem. If your spending your whole trip documenting it taking pictures and videos and whatnot, does it take away from the ability to simply enjoy where you are? I think that's why I only took pictures on two days. I wanted to enjoy being there. I wanted the memories of being in these places, not the pictures of them. Pictures and videos will never capture the whole scene, they'll never look the same as your mind remembers. What good is a picture or video without the smells and ambient sounds? You come back without a lot to show, but you've enjoyed it all the more. Right? I can't say. Next time I go anywhere I'm taking a video camera. I'll leave still pictures to The Ashes because she's a bang-up photographer. Take some videos, splice it together, overlay some pretty music, everbody oohs and aaahs.

It's just a matter of finding some place to go on the next trip. Iceland? That's pretty close. Ireland? Cheap flights. Argentina? Some beautiful country down that way. Peru? I hear Patagonia is amazing. Asia? Ideal, but expensive. Life will take me where it takes me. I'll get a whim, I'll go.