Bitten by the travel bug - more than once!

Subtitle: Once bitten, twice ….. hungry for more!

I can’t wait to be positive about being negative! Right now I am clearly negative about being positive, but maybe the silver lining is the ability, and more time than ever, to start posting my musings again. (Full disclosure, most of this post was written in November, once all the physical, emotional, & mental dominos had fallen and rainy weather gave me a day to sit healthfully and happily at my kitchen island and write).

As identified when I started this journey, I retired from public school teaching in June of 2018 with the intention of getting back to the destination, social, and educational travel my husband and I so enjoyed prior to moving to Worton, Md. in June of 2002. This was realized through March of 2019 with what I playfully term “Retirement Romps #1, 2, & 3. #4 was to have been on a river cruise along the Duro from Lisbon to Porto Portugal occurring in April 2020. As the reader can predict, that cruise was cancelled, and so was the rescheduled one, but with any luck we’ll go in 2023.

Before that however, we finally got back to traveling beyond an occasional car ride to Montgomery County Maryland or the middle of Virginia (which we didn’t even do until well into 2021). in August of 2022, we thoroughly enjoyed an ocean cruise (on Viking) to the fjords of Norway, the Faroe Islands, and Iceland. Truly magnificent countryside, waterways, waterfalls, histories, cultures, and foods! The weather prevented us from enjoying a seaplane excursion over the fjords of Norway, and a whale-watching excursion off the coast of Iceland, but that just meant more shipboard credits for deep tissue massages and other pampering. The really discouraging part was three days after I got home, it was confirmed that I was under the weather due to a COVID-19 infection. UGH!

Fosshóll, 08/15/2022

Luckily, I was fully up-to-date with the vaccination and subsequent boosters, as were my husband and 98-year-old Mother. Amazingly my husband never showed symptoms, nor did he ever test positive, and I kept making him test every so often as I isolated in a separate room and recovered. Unfortunately, I tested negative the day after returning home and figured I was simply experiencing the sinusitis/jet lag that I typically have whenever returning from an extended journey that includes long plane rides, hence I visited my mother the next day and although I kept my distance COVID didn’t and Mom tested positive six days later. Triple UGH! Luckily Mom suffered serious cold-like symptoms for less than 10 days then tested negative and fully cleared the residual symptoms shortly thereafter. Again, thank our good fortune (and good sense) to have been fully vaccinated. That is why we were lucky and as one of Charlemagne’s lines in the broadway hit, “Pippin” proclaims “It’s smarter to be lucky than it’s lucky to be smart!” We try to position ourselves to grasp the brass ring of luck whenever we can.

Update: Mom lived until May of 2023 when her body no longer served her phenomenal spirit and soul. That September we did indeed go on the Duro River Viking Cruise originally planned for April of 2020. It was wonderful AND no one returned home “sick”. Whew. My new reality is that while I will never out-grow, and hopefully I will never out-live, my “travel bug” (i.e. the love of journeys to places and people far and wide), I can currently only manage one “serious” trip per year and that needs to be contained to the USA “lower 48”. Luckily, I still travel vicariously through books, blogs, movies, and conversation with world-traveling friends. And as this current reality morphs into whatever comes next I may even find use once again for my passport and trusted traveler id. In the meantime: Sláinte, Salud, Kanpai, Prost, Santé, Cin cin, Gesondheid, Na zdrowie, Ygeia, Skål, Şerefe, Geonbae, Tagay, Gâew and of course Bon Voyage!

QThe House of Sandeman, 09/20/2023, Valença do Duro

Vila Nova de Gaia, 09/23/2023, View across the Duro