LSky

You are exactly right, Michel_Paris. Sometimes we don't know what awaits us, we can only be prepared.

If I miss traveling, I give my suitcase a good cleaning and get it ready to pack.

"Pack it and the trip will come"

imaginaryjazz

Don't think of grippe as being solely a Victorian-era disease -- it's been in the headlines here in France more often than not *this month*.

charnees

Oh, I get the envy every time someone I know is traveling to Italy. The worst was when I was supposed to go with DD and grandchildren, but broke my metatarsal bone in my foot and had to stay home!! WWAAAAAAAHHHHHH!! Of course, they had a marvelous time while I sat at home and sulked.

Dayenu

Another Trip-Envian here Living in San Francisco, I see people with suitcases daily. Why not me? And then the Internet with it's suggestively cheap Travelzoo, Priceline and such...

I think your feelings are normal.

tomassocroccante

I think that my feelings are normal, too, Dayenu. Self-flagellating, but normal. If you love to travel and have never felt trip-envy, you are either very fortunate and get to go , go, go at will, or you are not "in touch with your feelings." Sometimes it is so good to let the feelings rule and let the logic shut the hell up.

Seriously, I suppose needed the envy experience to kick me in the mozzicone. But don't worry: deep, self-pitying envy is not a sign of irreversible hopelessness. (Neither, I hope, is that un-renewed passport. It will happen. Fifty bucks and a stamp. And a new photo of older or newer me.)

Dobermina, you wisely remind me of the infamous Italian bureaucracy. But there has to be a downside to all the beauty, food and wine, right? I subscribe to the theory that a traveler seeking efficiency should visit Germany. La dolce vita has a price, and it may be la linea interminabile. Sigh.

Anyway, one of the spots on my must see lists may get seen in February. My friends (not the one who are in Maggiore now( have an apartment in Buenos Aires and have announced a 50th birthday week there. So I have to get that passport renewed, although I do not know how I am getting to BA. Possibly the way most people go, in a plane. But, no, I won't decide now that I won't be able to go then.

Michel, Yemen seems, let's say, unfriendly to me - at present. I have a friend who found it incredibly beautiful.
Big world, isn't it?

I grew up in a traveling family - that is, every summer we were piled into the car and we drove. Even years from Nebraska to North Carolina and other points east. Odd years anywhere from Canada to ... Colorado. Usually those odd years were short trips. But we all grew up thinking the road belonged to us, and that it was fun to see what strange sodas (we called it pop in Nebraska) they had at a service station with a sign you had never seen either. Going cross country in the US in the 50s and 60s was full of surprises, mostly good ones. For one thing, local restaurants served local favorites.

My brother and sisters and I are all, to some degree, blessed with a bit of wanderlust. We like to go. It's not that the grass will be greener, but the dirt will be a different color and we might learn a new word.

Speaking of grass, it's been growing around my feet. THAT's the problem!