People keep asking me if I'm excited, and I don't know what to tell them. This is the single craziest thing that I've ever done in my life for any number of reasons, and at the moment I'm feeling very calm and cool. I'm mostly thinking about how my pack is packed and things of that nature.

What I am doing is moderately, to totally insane for the following reasons:

1. I am going to many, many countries alone, where I don't speak the native language
2. I am going to many, many countries where merely drinking the water, eating the food, or standing outside have the very real ability to kill me.
3. I am going to many, many countries in which the customs will be completely alien to anything that I've encountered before, the people will look nothing like me so I won't blend in, and the political stability of which is questionable
4. I have only planned to the extent that I know where I will be arriving on a given day, and that is pretty much it. I don't have hostel reservations, I don't know people in a lot of these places and I'm going to have intermitent access to internet
5. (on a diffferent theme) I will be spending every penny that I have saved over the last year and a half and then some on this
6. When I get back, I will be attending one of the most expensive law schools in the country, and living in one of the most expensive cities in the country

So thats whats scary. Now here is what makes it better:

1. I have been enough places enough times in situations that are passably similar to what I am doing and have always worked things out.
2. I have done extensive enough research that I know that at the very least a place for me to stay exists in every place that I will be
3. I have plans to meet people along the way. These plans excite me almost as much as anything
4. A life without risk, a life without chance and without uncertainty and nerves and sheer chutzpah is a life that I could never be content with.

People ask me if I think that this will be the trip of a lifetime, and there is almost no question that bothers me as much as this. I have every hope that this trip will be fantastic. And I fully expect that it will be only the first (or second or third depending on your criteria) such trip of many. My wanderlust did not begin with this trip, my wanderlust led to this trip, and I don't see how it could possibly be satiated in a mere 6 months.

So here I am, my bag packed, passport visa'ed, cheap watch on my wrist and a pen stuck behind my ear. I'm wearing cargo pants and a t-shirt and sandals which can be exchanged for boots. I have a drug that will prevent me from getting malaria and a drug for climbing to high altitudes and a drug for when I get sick and some drugs for if I think that I'm getting sick. I have a knife and some tools and some underwear and I have socks and pants and a fleece. I have a bag that will be my closet, bureau, space under my bed and laundry hamper. I have been poked with needles and I have cut my fingers on the paper of books. There is little that I feel unprepared for, and there is little that I feel that I am ready to do. All that I know is that in the very near future, I will be somewhere else, and if that is the measure of travel, the physical removal of a person from one place to another, then I will be traveling. You may even say that I have traveled and be speaking about the past.

However simply moving from one place to another does not, to me, seem to be an adequate measure of travel. I don't expect to know what travel will feel like until after it has happened, because if you are contemplating the semantics of such a word, then you are clearly ignoring the sunset before you, the new friends to be made, the works of art by man and nature and the experiences that are passing you by as you sit pondering. So when I leave where I am now and go somewhere else, tell people that I have kept moving, kept changing, and that there will never come a day that that will not be the case. I can travel at my computer and I can travel by mule caravan, the point that remains is that it isn't traveling until you can say, with certainty what it was that you traveled to. Not where, what.

I will travel to something, and the moment that I find out what that something is, I will be sure to pass it along. After all, it is not something that can be kept to oneself, bottled up and preserved, or captured on film or disc. A camera captures an image, a memory captures a feeling, but an experience stays with you, becoimes an intrinsic part of you that can no more be broken out into individual components and analyzed than can the idea of the soul or the spirit.

Experience is travel, and I, for one, intend to make the most of that.