I am going to be out of the country for 6 weeks.  I am not sure how often I will be posting knitting.  I expect to be posting mostly travel posts for a while. Why put up with all the discomfort and frustration?  The knowledge that my IBS may get fired up enough to scare me into thinking it will never calm down again?  The stress of not being able to find a room when you have stumbled into a town where it is Holy Week and they have an important cathedral, or there is a conference in town taking up all the hotel space (luckily they don’t usually compete for the lowest end of the hotel market, but you never know). The fact that everything I have with me for weeks on end has to fit into a suitcase that is (23 cm x 40 cm x 55 cm or 9 in x 15.5 in x 21.5 in) … that is .05 cubic meters or 1.75 cubic feet, including an apnea machine that I really need to sleep. Not to mention the fact that the apnea machine needs electricity, which can be unreliable or even non-existent.

I do it because every day I see things I wouldn’t get to see at home.  Different foods and cultures and architecture.  Different people and traffic patterns.  Different crops in the fields, sometimes difficult to figure out.  World Heritage sites. Mountains, rivers, oceans. Sunrises and sunsets that don’t have my neighbours’ houses blocking them.

I also do it because I am hoping to once again see something that strikes me personally as so beautiful that I get an aching and profound sense of future loss for the present moment.  I know I can’t remain where I am, but I will never be there again.  I can only really remember this happening three times in my life.  Twenty five years ago on a mountainside in Nepal while hiking the Annapurna circuit.  In the Uffizi museum in Florence, Italy while standing in front of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, also 25 years ago now.  And finally on top of one of the pyramids in Tikal, 5 years ago, looking out at the rainforest canopy with other pyramids poking out and a rainstorm coming (someone from the star wars franchise obviously shared this one with me and put it in the movies).  I don’t know when and if it will ever happen again, but I continue to hope for it, and know my only hope is to travel.I have decided to show you all that I take for a 6 week trip.  I started a wish list in a laundry basket on the dining room table.  I rejected the dress, because my brother Charles in unlikely to want to go anywhere that would be appropriate.  

I don’t stint on socks, underwear and over the counter medications.