Saturday I began writing a new travel blog that I hope will support my new travel business. At the very least, I hope it will get people as excited about traveling as I am on a daily basis. My whole deal with traveling isn't that I just don't want to be at home. If I could take all of the comforts of home with me, it would just make it that much better. My deal is that I just want to SEE! I want to experience what the world has to offer. I always hear amazing things about amazing places and I think, why do I have to be stuck in one place?
I guess the whole point of it all is that we are only stuck if we choose to be. I don't want to die having only seen most of North Texas. Lately for some reason I have heard a lot of talk about legacies. It probably isn't a topic of conversation anymore right now than it has ever been. But it makes you think about what you would like for your legacy to be. Do I want to be remembered as someone who worked for the same company for 30 years and then found out that they didn't really need her anymore? Or do I want to be remembered as a person who knew her greatest passion and pursued it. I think I prefer the later, which is why I decided that I had to try this travel business and see if I could make a living doing it.
So far the nicest part of it is that it allows me to think about and talk about my favorite thing all day everyday, traveling. In my first two travel blogs I covered a few road trip memories and the Groupon experience I had in Hawaii. I have in mind two trips I would like to take someday. Both are in the same part of the world, but both also require a lot of time. So, I think it would be silly to do them together. One of these days I will go to Machu Picchu and the Galapagos Islands.
Yesterday I posed the question on Facebook asking where you would be right now, if you could be anyplace on earth. I didn't get many takers... two, in fact. Either most people were perfectly happy where they were at or were too busy watching football to respond. Quite frankly after watching that Cowboys game yesterday, I would rather be anywhere than in Dallas, but I digress. The responses that I got were good. One chose Hawaii - to be exact she chose a specific location in Hawaii http://www.koolina.com/ while the other decided on Ireland. Both nice places. To be honest, I would pack up and go to either right now if offered the opportunity. But if I could have chosen anyplace on earth to be yesterday, I think I would have picked Santiago Island, Galapagos. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santiago_Island_(Gal%C3%A1pagos)
The beauty of having a blog is that while my respondents gave brief answers yesterday, I get to spend an entire blog giving you mine. The drawback is that you can close this browser window and stop reading at anytime, so I'll try to make my case for my location quickly. The first reason that this might be considered a nice place to be is that the temperature during the bad part of the year is 72 degrees on average. During the good part of the year, it is 77 degrees. I know! That right there sort of makes it a perfect place. The average temperatures are the ideal thermostat settings in my house. I choose Santiago Island over the other Galapagos Islands only because it had a lava flow about 100 years ago which created great lava beds in the bay that house marine creatures and make it a great place for snorkeling.
If you were to go there, you could see marine and land Iguanas, sea lions, fur seals, land and sea turtles, flamingos, dolphins and sharks among other things. I love seeing wildlife in it's natural environment. As I am sure I have mentioned here before, one of the greatest experiences of my life was seeing Orcas in the San Juan Islands. Last year while in Hawaii, I made my travel buddy, Jenny stop at a particular location because I had seen in a travel forum on Trip Advisor that there was a new seal pup along with it's mother living there that had just been born a few weeks earlier. We didn't find it. But we spent about an hour looking. I am particularly a sucker for marine wildlife.
The Galapagos are on the Humboldt current which means that the water is pretty chilly and they get a lot of rain. So, those are drawbacks, in fact with the wind and rain that they get, the 72 - 77 degree average highs apparently seem somewhat chilly. Combine, the wind and rain with the cold water temperature coming up with the Humboldt and it can get downright uncomfortable. It seems that wetsuits are required there most of the time. But the good part of the islands being in the Humboldt is that you see the marine wildlife that is a part of that marine eco-system. That means that seeing a whale shark or schooling hammerheads is not completely uncommon. What I wouldn't give to see that!
So, that's where I'd like to be right now. I'm pretty sure that by now I have built it up so big in my mind that the Galapagos could never live up to my expectations. But I'd sure like to find out.
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