The year I graduated from college I spent the summer in Europe and have been traveling ever since. We lived in Brussels for three years when the kids were little and used that as a base for a number of trips. After we moved back to the States, I left for foreign lands any chance I got.
I’ve been to six of the seven continents, most of the countries in Western Europe, and some of those in Eastern Europe; to Wales, England, and Scotland in the U.K.; to Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan; Australia and New Zealand several times; Honduras; Costa Rica; Mexico; Venezuela; Chile; Argentina; the Galapagos Islands; Egypt; and Morocco.
A number of my trips have been “adventure travel” – hiking in Patagonia; white-water rafting in Chile; a tent safari, a canoe trip through hundreds of hippos on the Zambezi River, and white-water rafting below Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe; walking and riding camels in the Sahara; and white-water rafting in Papua New Guinea, where I also spent several interesting days in a fourth-world hospital battling a nasty tropical infection.
I still have to get to Ethiopia, I want to go back to New Zealand and Patagonia, and I continue to spend summers in France and Ireland on a regular basis. My big regret is that I never got to sleep in a yurt in the Hindu Kush, and – given the turmoil in Central Asia – I probably never will.
2011 Update: I made it to Ethiopia this year – to the Timkat Festival (the biggest festival in the country and the most spectacular) in Gondar; to Lalibela to see the churches carved into stone; and to the Rift and OmoValleys where the Mursi tribeswomen wear large clay plates in their slit lips and ear lobes. Also went back to England and Ireland.