Wanderlust - an Endless Series

In little more than a week I'll be heading overseas again, leaving on 30 December with my most excellent friend and colleague Steve Wehmeyer to shepherd nineteen students around Zanzibar for two weeks.  I should be frantic right now, although I'm oddly calm.  Now, I'm crazy busy because we have last minute details to work out in regards to this trip (should I get $100 or $200 worth of Tanzanian shillings in advance?; the exchange rate will be brutal, but I hate to land with no local currency), but I also need to finish travel proposals for two trips next year (an expanded Zanzibar trip [if two professors and nineteen students is epic, then, mathematically, wouldn't four professors and thirty students be even more epic?] and a new junior level course/trip to India) and I need to get all four of my spring courses finished, printed off, and loaded in Canvas before I leave (because we're not coming back until the day before the semester starts).  So why am I calm?  Sure, part of it relates to the fact that this will be my fourth trip to Zanzibar, and we've run a shorter version of the trip before, and we have fantastic contacts on Unguja and Pemba.  However, it's more than that; I'm going overseas and that will make me happy.  As I've proposed several times, my friends always tell me that there's me here and there's me overseas, and they are fundamentally different creatures.  I'm simply happier overseas, and not simply because it's a jolly (as the LBG used to say), because these trips require a ton of work and I need to look after nineteen college students whose cause/effect part of the brain hasn't finished baking yet.  I do get to leave my fairly mundane life behind, at least for a week or two, and that makes any of us happy.  What is more, I do feel that I learn something more about the world, and arguably more important about myself, on every trip.  It seems like the last few years things have played themselves out wherein I get to spend a month overseas every year, and if I can continue to pull that off I might be happier on both sides of the ocean.

This picture has absolutely nothing to do with Zanzibar, but it's what launched this timid reflection on travel.  I was looking for a specific email yesterday in my overloaded inbox and came across this picture from Portugal.  It's taken from the parapets of the St. George Castle looking out at Lisbon.  And even though I'm currently working on four different trips, it made me think how much I wanted/needed to go back to Portugal.  There's always one more trip.