A flight 10 am thursday, march 26.

Landing in Barcelona, a highly anticipated beginning to a long awaited journey. I have wanted to travel alone through the world since I was very small. When my friends were playing house, doing counting games that would match up boys names to dwelling types and number of kids born, I was plotting and scheming to backpack across Africa. When they were poring over magazines to see what clothes flatter the figures they would grow into, the makeup that would enhance features most ably, I was imagining walking barefoot and eating mangoes from trees. Never wanted marriage, never wanted children, except in passing once in a while, it was always the dream of movement that made me reel with joy.

The list of names, Zanzibar, Madagascar, Byzantium, Skantzoura, Sumer, Samarkand, Katmandu, Belize, Oaxaca that would roll off my tongue as I dreamed away recess, lunch and nearly every class inbetween.

Anytime I thought of the career I would have it involved travel. I would be a marine biologist and dive the world’s oceans, swimming with dolphins and manta rays. I would be a famous dancer like Josephine Baker (I even briefly changed my name to Josephine in grade 4, my teacher was very understanding) and travel the world dancing in the best clubs. Or sing like Nina, Billie, Shirley, Ella and tour extensively the jazz clubs and speakeasy circuit. By the time I hit puberty my ideals evolved so that I most wanted to emulate Patti, Chrissie, Debbie, Siouxsie, Poly, et al. still singing, still travelling, waaaay different clubscene.

I could become a lighting tech for cirque du soleil’s travelling shows. Read books for audible from a studio (beach) somewhere. Rehabilitate tropical birds displaced by rainforests torn asunder. Plan strategies for anarchist revolutions in banana republics.  Teach guatemalan children to hulahoop. Teach penguins to tango. All truly selfless acts that enable momentum. Or at least lunch somewhere I’ve never been before.

Or I would hitchhike and write, a la kerouac. Rushing headlong into adventure with the horizon at my back. But sometimes the adventuring gets in the way of the chronicling. Kerouac always insisted it was Neal Cassidy who was the Dean Moriarty, the one who existed to move, to flow, to go with it, whatever it was and wherever it went. Sal Paradise followed and kept track of it all.
Then there was Miss Tallulah’s take on it, ‘Only good girls keep diaries, bad girls don’t have time.’

I shall attempt to strike a blance, as I like to do with all things. Everything has a pivot point, a happy medium.

Move as a Cassidy, write as a Kerouac.

Live as vivaciously as Tallulah (perhaps less random nudity, perhaps not).

Adventure as fearlessly as Margaret Fountaine.

And so my trip to Europe and by extension the world begins with hope and delight.

I can’t wait to see how this turns out.