My brother and his wife just got back from Paris, and that's started me thinking about travel. I was lucky in my youth to have parents who enjoyed travel and were willing to bring David & me along, so I'd managed to do a fair amount of traveling by the time I reached adulthood. It also helped that we had UNC's teams to lead the way to exotic locations; the basketball Tar Heels took us to New York for the 1971 NIT, to Los Angeles (and the thrilling La Brea Tar Pits) for the NCAA Final Four in 1972, to Madrid for a Christmas tournament in 1974, to Atlanta for the 1977 Final Four, and to Hawaii for the 1977 Rainbow Classic. The football Heels went to slightly less exotic areas--Atlanta for two miserably cold Peach Bowl losses (to Arizona State and Kentucky) and Jacksonville for two Gator Bowl victories, including the legendary Fog Bowl victory over Michigan. We did, however, manage to sneak off to Disney World on one Gator Bowl excursion, which made the place seem plenty exotic for our purposes. We also got to accompany my dad on his Marine-Corps-ordered trip to England in 1982, a trip which led to my continuing love affair with the island of Great Britain, where I returned for a year of college (1983-84), a honeymoon (1986), and a five-week course-and-family-trip (1999).

Dave was bitten by the travel bug even harder than I. He spent a semester in Italy in college, then spent four years in Japan after graduation. While there (and on the way home), he passed through Thailand, China, Russia, Czechoslovakia, and probably dozens more nations I've forgotten. He went to Africa and climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro. He hung out on a hops farm in Czechoslovakia for a few days and struck up conversations with painters by the waterside in St. Petersburg. (He also took a lot of excellent photos; he's a terrific photographer, and it's a skill I hope he'll continue to develop in the future.) Then it was back to Italy after grad school, and off to Paris now that he's a married man. It's enough to make a guy jealous.

So where do I want to go? Well, Italy is the first target; Kelly and I have some research to do for a book we're working on, and with any luck, we'll get to it this spring. I'm also hoping to make it to California this summer; I haven't been there since I was nine, and I have literally dozens of friends there (including some I haven't actually met yet, but that's a technicality.) The Book Expo America convention is in LA this May, and that's a good excuse to go, but I'm most eager to visit the Bay Area, which I've never done. Here's hoping we don't get nailed by fire or earthquake while we're there; of course, if we can survive the East's forest fires, hurricanes, tornadoes and snipers, Cali should be doable.

Long-term? The Galapagos Islands. Australia. New Zealand. The Caribbean. The Everglades (while they're still there.) Scandinavia. Africa. Costa Rica. The Amazon. Acadia National Park in Maine. Big Bend National Wildlife Reserve in Texas. Vancouver. Alaska. Ireland. Tahiti. And last but not least, Antarctica.

So if anyone's got a place to stay, let me know.
9:15 AM

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