Panda’s FishNet

So I have been traveling a bit this year. I took 11 trips, traveled to 5 different countries, 28 locations, flew 50,000 miles, and spent a total of 60 days away from home. So that’s 2 months out of 6 months from January to the first week of July. By the end of this calendar year, I am pretty sure I will double my miles flown so far, which will probably turn out to be 100,000 miles on a plane by December 31.

Crazy I know. A lot of friends ask me why I travel so much. Well, to many of them, my response is “depends on what you are comparing to”. Compared to many of my friends and peers, perhaps I travel quite frequently, but I also know people who pretty much commute between Europe and the East Coast. And they sure have tons of miles to burn!

Nevertheless, I think I may have over compensating travel a bit. By that I mean I rarely traveled when I was a kid. My parents back in the days did not have the means to travel to anywhere greater than 250 miles from the city we lived in. It’s kind of amazing that I can pretty much jet around the globe at a moment’s notice as long as there’s still a seat on the plane and money or frequent flier miles is not an issue. So I am fully taking advantage of my financial ability as well as mobility to devote however much free time I have to travel. In a way that I am kind of over compensating for the lack of travel in my childhood days.

I am always a curious person. My brain is kind of like a sponge that sucks up as much information as I can take. So by the way my brain is wired, naturally I am very inclined to experience new things. And traveling is probably the best and most efficient way to go about achieving that. The cheapest way to experience new things is probably not traveling, but going to museums. Perhaps that’s why I am also a big fan of going to the museums.