Unfinished business… (Wednesday, 24 February 2010)

(Where am I now: Sitting at my desk in my apartment in Geneva.

What am I listening to: “All that she wants” from Ace of Base)

It had to happen again. It is unavoidable. But what does it really take to pick up the virtual pen (or the keyboard in this case) and type away after more than a year of absence, after more than a year in the “fridge” of “immobility and daily routine? Don’t get me wrong, it’s been more than a year since I came back from my dream trip and even by those standards I have still managed to travel a lot: Sweden, Turkey, Spain, Italy, France, and Portugal to name a few. It’s been a year full of travel – mostly with work – but at the end, only tonight did I get that same feeling, that rush I felt constantly from the moment I booked my round-the-world ticket in August 2008. Only tonight do I get this exhilarating feeling that there’s something out there to be discovered. It looks like it was ages ago… It has been.

So tonight it was. Sitting at my desk in the office at work after 7pm, I took out my little paper with my self-made calendar and counted the days, double-checked the destinations, triple-checked the connection flights and timetables, took out my credit card, typed in the magical number and pressed “BUY”.

I have it. The last part of the trip, my “unfinished business”, my last stop in the sabbatical to fulfill the promise I made to myself to touch all continents and see the few cities I’ve always dreamt of. I am going to San Francisco in May. The last stop. The new beginning.

And so it starts all over again. It was bound to happen and I hoped for it sooner than later but this is how things are so it took more time than I thought. When I came back from my trip I had promised myself: “one big trip every year”. So here it is.

Frisco, was the one place I didn’t manage to visit during my trip. Lack of time and also another continent on the ticket made it too expensive, I vowed to visit in the near future. And the future is in May. I will be away for 12 days, a tiny amount of time compared to the big trip but I am determined to do it the “Kostas way”: Cover long distances, experience different places and people (more in the plan for both than I can say now) and just remind myself how important travel is in my life. Mind you, I never forgot it – it’s work and daily life that make some things fade away, move to the backseat of the priority vehicle when at the end they were never more important, never more relevant! I promised not to forget.

I don’t know if this is a return to the blog but I know that today I’ve felt good enough to come back to this and type away my thoughts and share them with whoever is out there.

So many things come to my mind from the previous trip and so many expectations for the one that’s coming up, for the past 4 hours I’ve had this constant grin on my face like someone that knows a big secret not to be shared with anyone.

It’s not a secret.

Kostas Around The World… is BACK! (and lovin’ it!)