It all started one afternoon when I picked up a travel magazine while waiting for my car to be serviced at Jiffy Lube.
There it was, on the cover ...... a full page, color photo of an ancient monument that I had always dreamed of someday being able to visit. As I read the accompanying article, I found myself mesmerized by photos of faces, landmarks, and wildlife of a place that had always seemed so foreign, beautiful and exotic to me and that I've always been inexplicably drawn to.
When I got home from Jiffy Lube, I immediately got on-line, fired up Google and started to search for a way to get to the places where I could see the faces, landmarks and wildlife that I could not get out of my mind. After some intense surfing, I found a company that offered an adventure tour package that just simply appealed to me on so many different levels. I bookmarked the website and got off-line. I needed to think about whether or not this was passing whim or if I was really serious about going on this trip.
For the next week or so, I did more surfing to check out other travel options all the while returning to the website that I had bookmarked earlier. The more familiar I became with the bookmarked site, the more convinced I was that I had to go on the trip. So one night, I decided to do it and made an on-line reservation. By the end of the next day, I had a confirmed travel reservation, hotel booking and a roundtrip airline ticket.
I was so excited I could barely focus on work!!!
At first, I decided to not tell anyone that I was even going on vacation but as the weeks passed, I got more and more excited and eventually, spilled the beans to a few of my closest friends. I, of course, shared the news with my family whom I am convinced think I am crazy and if they could, would probably have be locked up in the loony bin!
As the reality of my going sank in, I decided I needed to start planning my trip because the days would go by fast and I wanted to make sure I would be prepared. Little did I know just how much planning I needed to do!
