I'm always the last person to see these things, plus PSA

I'm not usually big on linking to youtube videos, but this and this totally made my morning.

Also, my annual public service announcement:

My friend Jonathan went to Africa last year, spent several months in Europe, and is now in India.

Every year or two, he travels around the world for several months. He is also a writer. And, for the past four years, he has sponsored a writing contest, the prize being a roundtrip ticket to anywhere in the world (!) Jonathan has asked people to get the word out, so if you like to write and you'd like to travel, here's a link to the contest details.

You can write poetry, fiction, non-fiction, or prose, ten thousand words max, and (along with your writing sample) you have to submit a little thing about yourself and why you want to travel (you have to specify which country, it's not an open-ended thing). Your entry cannot have been previously published. If you win, you have to go to a country you've never been before. And he gets to publish your winning entry online.

That's it! So what are you waiting for?

Travel Thursday: Places I've been (and where I'd like to go)

When I was a kid, we didn't have much money for traveling. I remember taking exactly one vacation before I graduated high school (at least, one that wasn't just going to Southern California to visit my dad's family). We went to Santa Cruz when I was seven for a weekend; I have vague memories of the boardwalk and playing on the beach in a bathing suit. Usually if we went anywhere, it was a very very long drive down to LA, and we stayed at my Grandma's house and played with cousins. We flew to Texas a few times in my adolescence to visit my mom's aunt and other relatives. The summer after I graduated high school, we went on a week-long family road trip around California, which was mostly uncomfortable with five of us in an un-airconditioned minivan in August. We camped in Lake Tahoe and Sequoia and King's Canyon and somewhere near the southernmost glacier (I think that was in Kern county). We drove through Fresno, the armpit of California, on the hottest day of the year. Being 17 and being forced to go four days without a shower was a somewhat stinky, hairy, and miserable experience, so I insisted I be given some quarters to take a shower in one of the campgrounds - only to determine that trying to shave one's legs in a cold shower proves a bloody exercise.

In my senior year of high school, a project for one of my classes included a time capsule to be opened at least 5 years later. One of the many elements of the time capsule was a list of things I wrote that I wanted to have accomplished or done or experienced by the time I opened it. On the list I wrote was a secret dream I'd been harboring for years - to go to Europe after college, on my own. I worked my butt off in college to earn extra money to pay for my trip, spent four years with the trip in the back of my head, and a few weeks after I graduated I went on the trip. I'd planned it all myself, with the help of a Let's Go Europe and the website where I ended up meeting Dan (and EEK, and QIR, and Monkey, and Cil, and Yank in Texas, and Guateholla). I flew open jaw into Paris and out of London, in between getting to experience Barcelona, Nice, Monaco, Rome, Florence, Venice, Cinque Terre, Interlaken, Salzburg, Krakow, Prague, Munich, Wurtzburg, Rotenburg, Heidelburg, Freiborg, back to Paris and the chunnel to London. Plus some day trips I'm forgetting. It was probably the most amazing experience of my life, and gave me the travel bug, big time.

Since going to Europe, I've mostly traveled around North America. I went to Michigan to visit my Europe travel friend, and we went down into Ohio to the amusement park in Sandusky. I went to Chicago, and DC, and Toronto. I've been all over Colorado, to Wyoming and South Dakota and Nebraska. When I moved to Colorado, on the trip we went to Tijuana and through Arizona and New Mexico. We've driven and taken the train through Utah and Nevada; work has taken me to Boston, Seattle, Indianapolis, and Minneapolis. This summer, we went to Kentucky, passing through Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana. The list of states I've been to has grown exponentially since my paltry high school two. But there's still an entire South, most of the East Coast, and a good chunk of the midwest I've never seen. And there's most of Canada, and almost all of Mexico, and that's just this continent!

Precisely two years ago right now we were in China. Our three-week trip included about 10 days in Beijing and a week in Xi'an, with a few days in Luoyang when we went up to the Shaolin monastery. But we barely scratched the surface of China, and haven't been anywhere else in Asia (other than Tokyo Narita airport). We've never been to Australia or New Zealand, anywhere in Africa, South America or the Middle East. There's most of a world out there, actually. So many places to go, and luckily I'm marrying someone with just as much wanderlust as I have. We won't have enough time to do the UK/Ireland trip we'd fantasized about as a honeymoon, but we'll get there someday. And we've got pages and pages of blank space in our passports.