Nov 20, 2010 | Written by Patricia Murphy

Dusting off the Blog

It’s no secret that 2009 was a rough year for me–let’s hope the roughest of my life. My mom dropped dead of a heart attack on John’s birthday, and within 5 months my dad was dead from cancer. Even though they were both life-long smokers, I never imagined that both of my parents would be dead before I turned 40. But that’s how it happened. So I’m certain you’ll forgive me for stepping away from the blog.

Now over a year later I’m negotiating each day as you might imagine I would. Some days I want to take on the world. Other days I want the world to go away. I’m a different person now. I’ve been told this is normal.

Even though my personality and priorities have changed, a lot of my interests remain the same. And one of those is travel. After my father died, even as I sorted through notebooks and files and years worth of statements in an attempt to settle his complicated estate, one of the activities I also managed was planning a trip to Chile for May 2010. And what a wonderful trip it would have been had there not been an 8.8 magnitude earthquake 2 months before we were supposed to tour Santiago, Atacama, Cochalgua, and Valparaiso. When I called US Airways in March to ask if they might refund the money for our tickets and they responded “Certainly, right away!” we decided that the trip to Chile could wait.

John and I have a promise that each year we will visit a country we have never visited, and 2010 will be our twelfth consecutive year of fulfilling the promise.  When the Chile trip was canceled, we knew we had to replace it with a trip we could complete by December. We talked about a short trip to Antigua or Barbados. But then as my 40th birthday loomed, I decided that we better accomplish some of our dream trips while we still can. I made a list of my top 25 trips, and I asked John to do the same. And that’s how we realized we should get ourselves to Peru, pronto. And so we are flying to Lima on Dec 17th, then on to Cusco where we will get acclimated to the elevation. On Dec 22 we will start our 4 day Inca Trail trek so that we arrive to Machu Picchu on Christmas day.

So I will be updating this blog with tales of our trip planning and then with our trip taking. It feels wonderful to write again, and to travel again too.

1999	Venezuela
2000	Belize
2001	China
2002	Scotland/Ireland
2003	Costa Rica
2004	Honduras
2005	Argentina
2006	St Lucia
2007	Korea/Thailand
2008	Turks and Caicos
2009	Spain/France
2010	Peru!!!

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