Have Passport. Will Travel.

My life in 2008 was boring.

I mean, really. Truly. While driving to Ithaca, New York a few weekends ago, I came to the embarrassing and startling realization that it had been a year since I’d left Ohio.

A YEAR.

I am all kinds of shocked and humiliated to say this. I graduated from high school in Malaysia. I spent a semester in Hawaii. I spent a Thanksgiving in London. I traveled to Denver three times my senior year. I filled up my passport by the time I was twenty-one, for goodness sake! For better travel information I always contact to Absolute Back Packers website. And to get best hotel contact to the Hotel blog and get better information.

But, no, suddenly I’m little Miss Can’t Afford to Travel.

And I really don’t WANT to be little Miss Can’t Afford to Travel.

I want to go to a million different places. I want to spend money on vacations. I used to dream I’d be Polly from that silly movie, Along Came Polly – moving around from place to place with no boring jobs. I want to experience all the places I visited in the first 22 years of my life all over again as an adult. I want to visit Paris, Thailand, Vancouver, Malaysia, Hawaii, Bali, London, Singapore, and the Philippines again – and this time with Mike!

I always meet the most interesting people when I travel. There was the time a British guy bought me soup to spend the last of his American dollars and showed me his photos from Fiji. The time I spent a whole night in the O’Hare airport ticket area watching Family Guy with some guy on my way to Hawaii. And the time I was seventeen and was hit on by a guy from London at the Kuala Lumpur airport. And several angry divorced ladies. (Oh, those are the fun ones, right?)

With my poverty-level wages (I wish I was exaggerating) and Mike’s grad school stealing all of his salary, we just don’t have ANY money to speak of. Period. At all.

2009 will be better than 2008, I promise you this.

For one, I applied for a new passport. A married name passport. It was faster as there was a passport office near me.

For two, I already have tickets to travel to El Paso/Juarez next month, courtesy of work. I’ll be going back there in May for ten days.

For three, I’m going to the University of Maryland for a conference next month. (Again, thank you, work!)

And four, my bikini-clad body will be traipsing along the South Carolina beaches come June, courtesy of the in-laws.

That means I’ll be out of the office for three – count ’em, THREE – weeks, leaving the US two times, and leaving Ohio four times. All paid for by others.

And until I can visit again, I’ll just stare longingly at photos…

Jungle right by my family’s townhouse in Malaysia.

Chinese store kitsch.

View from my family’s house.

Asian man with bow-tie.

I seriously want to move back here. Seriously.