Monday's a Bitch

Travel

1. What are the top three places you’d like to visit before you die?
I'd like to do a photo safari in Eastern Africa
I'd like to go back to Moscow and St. Petersburg in the summer
I'd like to spend a month or so in Australia and New Zealand

2. Who would be your ideal travel buddy?
Someone who lets me get as neurotic as I need to be and can calm me down if necessary. Someone patient and well-traveled. Someone who spoke 8 or 10 languages.

3. What’s the longest time you’ve been away from home?
Probably a toss-up between spending 5 weeks with my sister the summer I was 11 while my parents went to England, and spending 5 weeks in the USSR and China...and Italy...while I was in college.

4. Where's the best place you’ve ever visited?
Ydra, Greece

5. What’s your favourite travel story?
So very very many of them....singing the national anthem on the tarmac of an airport in Russia...Sparky being given a teddy bear by a Greek cabbie...climbing up and down the dales through sheep fields in Yorkshire to throw rocks in the river...watching a monkey tear the weather stripping off of a car in a safari park in Canada...going to sleep in Maine and hearing absolutely nothing except water lapping at the rocks outside our camp...freezing my ass off in a tent/cabin in Yellowstone in bloody AUGUST...burning off chest hairs of one of the guys on the drive to a church retreat in high school...marching in a Disney parade, a Knott's Berry Farm parade, and the Tournament of Roses parade in one week...wandering around the Forum at night in Rome...searching for groceries in Irkutsk in January, and finding nothing but pear juice and bread...hot tea every morning on the "Chinese train"...getting up at 4 to leave on a long weekend vacation and stopping for breakfast in Johnson City where the cream containers were shaped like cows...waiting out a tornado warning in my sister's basement after a called-off softball game...driving a canal boat through the canals in Leicestershire...