50

Today is my 50th birthday. For the first time in a birthday post (there are five more before this), I'm not holding a beer and smiling at the camera. Instead, I'm holding a glass of wine and smiling at the camera because I'm in the Napa Valley in California celebrating my first half-century on the planet before heading north to Portland, Oregon to do some more celebrating. Only this time with beer.

This date was supposed to be the last day of this blog. It won't be. I'm having too much fun and growing and learning too much. I'll get to all of that in a minute or two.

This past year I traveled in many respects less than I have in either of the four prior years. In years one through four, I made at least two trips out of the country and set foot in Europe each of those years. This past year, I traveled abroad just once and I skipped Europe entirely. Some of that was due to timing. I traveled a ton between my 48th and 49th birthdays (including making it to four continents) and so had to save up some time off this past year. Some of it was due to going all in on a two week trip to Africa; I hadn't taken two full weeks off from work in almost seven years.

That doesn't mean that this year wasn't incredible because it certainly was. For a start, we saw a ton of different wildlife; three of my four trips this year were centered around birds and mammals large and small. Only a long weekend in Detroit saved us from a full year of animal-focused trips. We also checked a number of things off my non-existent bucket list, including some things that we didn't even know were on there. Seeing the Big Five in Africa, jumping with the Masai, seeing Denali (even though we didn't really see all of it) and visiting Detroit all fit into this category. That last one's not a typo; Detroit is still on my list. One weekend in the Motor City just isn't enough to do everything I want to see in that city.

On top of all that stuff and so much more that's made it into this blog and plenty of stuff that hasn't, I managed to lay eyes on my favorite building in the world on a seven hour or so layover in Amsterdam on our way back from Africa. It's the Amsterdam Stock Exchange and it's shown in the photograph below. I love this building!

So now what? Well, as I mentioned in paragraph two of this post, I am not stopping. I've already modified the subtitle of this blog from "a 1,827 day project dedicated to broadening my horizons" to "a 1,827 day project dedicated to broadening my horizons that just kept going". I'm also today committing (God willing) to extend this journey for a further five years. No I'm not changing the title of the blog to Ten Years. Get over it.

When I started this blog, I set out a series of goals for personal travel and I completed all of those by age 49 at the latest. It's time for a new set of priorities to measure my success; not that these will cover all the places I'll go, because I don't have a clear vision of the next five years right now. Big picture-wise on my 45th birthday, I'd visited just two continents. Now I'm at five. There are two left, one inhabited (Australia or Oceania, if you prefer) and one is not really (Antarctica). The first commitment I'm making today is to add Oceania (I'm going with political continents, not geographical) to my continents visited list.

The second commitment I'm re-making is to visit the one city in Europe I've thought about visiting more than any other. Five years ago, that place was Barcelona, Spain. Today, it's Cologne, Germany. Enough talking about wanting to drink kölsch and see the cathedral. Go do it!

Closer to home, I'm also committing to complete my quest to visit all 50 states. Right now, I'm at 46 with Arkansas, Kansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma remaining. I intend to get two of those by driving the length of Route 66 from Chicago to Santa Monica. That's a trip I've wanted to take for a while but I just keep putting it off. That has to get completed before I turn 55. I have no idea how I get the other two. I'm still searching for what the heck I would even do in Arkansas (although I have some preliminary ideas). I'll figure it out.

Finally, there have to be some wonderlust-type spots on the next five years list. There are. I have to make it to either Easter Island off the coast of Chile (like, waaaaaay off the cost) or Machu Picchu in the Peruvian Andes. And I absolutely have to, no question about it, no excuses accepted, make my way to Angkor Wat in Cambodia. I've wanted to visit that place since I was a sophomore in college which at this point is more than 30 years ago. And that's just way too long to want to go to one place without going.

But enough of the future. Today is day 1,827 of this blog. I made it. And for the next two days I'm kicking back in the Napa Valley and doing absolutely nothing except drinking wine and eating food and enjoying the last day of my five year commitment, and the first day of my next, with the person I love most of all in life. Happy birthday to me!

Oldupai (not a typo) Gorge, Tanzania. Somewhere out there the Leakeys discovered early man.