I’ve done many things this time to prepare for my upcoming trips.   This blog is the beginning of a new way I will travel from now on.   I’ve always wanted to share what I see with the world and I want to do that in words and photos.   I’m planning the first of two overseas trips, the first is to Eastern Europe, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary.   The second is to Uganda.   My tickets are booked and I’m leaving April 7.   I realized that I will be spending my birthday on the last day of my first trip, probably alone in a hotel in Budapest.   Oh well!   I stopped having birthdays at 39 anyway.

This year I’ll be traveling completely electronically savvy.  I am only doing this so I can blog and stay connected with my girls.   I hope that my staff understands that I probably won’t be doing much office work during this time but I will be there for them in a crisis.   There is an ongoing joke in my office that the pentacle of issues that occur on a day to day basis all started “when you were in China.”   I had an employee that used to always refer to any problems or things that were done wrong as what occurred because of my China trip.  It is like one of those catch phrases that are coined on vacation and the whole trip revolves around that.   Now any mysterious issue or employee error must have surely started when I was in China or because I went to China.   It became fun to blame everything on that.

The reality was, my laptop crashed upon my arrival in China and my high tech plans went to plan B and the whole office turned into a tornado aftermath.    “Enjoy the trip, don’t worry about us,”  they said.  Years later, my memory fails to realize why the working world was changed when I was in China, yet, people were still referring to that time.

I have so much to do yet I’m relaxed about it all, that could be a problem later.  I’ll be the first to admit I’m a professional procrastinator.

I’ll only have 5 weeks turn around time between the two foreign trips so that should be interesting.

The naming of this blog is turning into a recurring nightmare.  I want something catchy and memorable.