I want to travel. Everyone says I'll be doing plenty of that once I'm commissioned in May, but once that happens, I'll have very little freedom. Sure, there'll be the chance at seeing some far-off places (garden spots like Bahrain and Guam come to mind), but I won't have much of a choice in where I'd be going. "Needs of the service" and all that fun stuff. Well, I suppose Pensacola will be fun (Gulf Coast of Florida and all that) while I'm there for flight school. After that though, who knows?
I've had a deep-rooted urge to see the UK--specifically Scotland--for several years now. I'll most likely have the opportunity to travel come summer, when I get 30 days of basket leave. I really, really want to do a little bit of irresponsible spending to see the world while I have the chance (but how is traveling abroad irresponsible when it doesn't become a habit?), but I don't want to do it by myself. I'm terrible at meeting new people, so I want to be able to enjoy the sights with somebody, rather than having nobody to talk to but myself the whole time. One person, a few people, whomever.
Dammit, even if I can't make it to the UK, I still want to do something for my last summer of my free life--once I'm done, I'm done. Even if it's just a road trip back to Wyoming to see mountains again, I want to do something. But it doesn't look like anyone else would be able to: either financial or temporal conflicts--usually both. I've talked with some friends who did a week in the UK a couple of years ago: London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Cork, for around $2000 ($1000 travel, the rest spending money). They said their problem was that they tried to do too much too fast. If I end up going, I want to fly into London, spend a day or two there, then hit Edinburgh. Maybe a day trip or something to Loch Ness, but that's it--I don't want the whole thing to be one giant road trip, I want to see more than just the M1 and other highways.
Oh yes readers, I've been to 40 states (including Hawaii), Italy, Mexico, several Caribbean islands, and a brief stop in England, but Italy was the only foreign country I spent any length of time in. I want to go to Scotland and see the castles and the highlands; I want to go to England and see the history there. I want to go back to Wyoming and stand on a ridge with a view again; I want to go to Alaska and see the beauty of Nature undiminished. Here's hoping I get the chance to see something like this again:
(I took this out my tent's door one morning in the Wyoming backcountry; the one at the beginning was taken...atop a ridge on the same backpacking trip).
Oh to feel the mountain wind on my face again! That's some of the stuff dreams are made of!
--Mr. NFO 2009
