As I write this, Memorial Day weekend is upon us. I have Monday off and I fully intend to “call in sick” on Friday. Four days of freedom meant it was imperative that I get the hell out of here; I haven’t left town since Christmas, everything in Aspen is closed for the off-season (including the airport), flights out of Vail are prohibitively expensive and my best friend has been IMing me from her fabulous vacation/work trip in Ireland and Portugal so I was just about going crazy with claustrophobia. Plus, we’re really not within driving distance of anywhere remotely interesting (Denver= totally meh) save Moab, which was booked solid by the time I got around to investigating. I know you’re sitting on the edges of your seats at Mudhouse waiting for the end of my tale of woe, but suffice it to say that I have indeed finally found someplace to take myself (although it wasn’t without a good dose of self-absorbed frustration).
While tearing my hair out and screaming at these mountains that create my prison walls, I decided to exacerbate my condition by doing a little research into the fun vacations that total strangers were taking without me. And so I found MyTripJournal.com, which is a site where people can blog about how they are seeing the world while I can’t even seem to get out of Colorado. Ostensibly these blogs are intended for the friends and family of the vacationers, and not losers—like myself—intent on making themselves feel more trapped than they already are. However, the beauty of a little travel voyeurism is that it elevates frustration such as mine to near orgasmic levels. Arrrrrghhhh!!!!! I want to go to Italy! I want to go to Rio! I want to go to Vietnam! Hell, I’ll go to East Timor!!!!!
What’s better is that the site’s administrators have weeded through the blogs and posted a section of the ones they think are the best. Sure, the writing still sucks for the most part (that’s not rude! Most people can’t write! It’s a fact!), but the trips are top notch. It runs the gamut from old people with Winnebagos driving around the U.S. of A. for two years to recent college grads backpacking around Europe for four months to middle-aged professionals just taking some time off to see the things they’ve never seen. No matter who they are or where they are, it all sounds good to me.
