Travel

I have always traveled.  I grew-up an Army Brat (Horrah!) and it just felt “natural” to move every few years.  We often moved from place-to-place with a classic American road trip to our future assignment. My parents (and especially my mother) always wanted (and encouraged) me to take advantage of opportunities. Regardless of where we lived, we did things, we saw things, and we generally got out. As I’m sure it is with most, many of the trips I took as a kid have stayed with me as some of my fondest memories and now I seek to do the same thing for my kids.

I’ve always embraced the philosophy that the joy (and the adventure) is in the journey and not necessarily in the destination.  After graduating from college this nomadic sense stayed with me.  I completed my freshman year of college in Hawaii.  I then deferred two years of college to served as a volunteer representative for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  I lived in six cities in the Netherlands and traveled throughout the Netherlands and Belgium.  Upon returning to the U.S. I attended Brigham Young University for a semester before jet-setting to the Middle East where I studied in East Jerusalem and traveled throughout Israel, Jordan and Egypt. Following my semester in the Middle East I spend 2+ months traveling through Eastern Europe. The traveling continued, but I’ll cut the log short here.

Fast forward to today and I’m fortunate to work for a great organization and frequently represent them by speaking at a myriad of conferences around the globe. This year I’m on-track to log about 150,000 miles. Through these adventures I often find myself eating interesting things and staying in interesting places. At the same time, I follow a few travel blogs and it occurred to me that I too could participate in this conversation by writing reviews on hotels or restaurants.  In all of this, I’ll attempt to hold true to my mantra that the adventure is the journey.

With all of this said, I’ve been taking photos at places I’ve eaten or stayed over the last six months, but just haven’t found the time to write much in this domain.  I’m 24 hours out from a trip to Stockholm and I’m flipping through the photos of random hotel rooms I’ve stayed at over the last 6 months. Hopefully I can catch-up (or at least start).