Planning My 2018 Bday Trip

Regular readers of this blog already know that I love to travel and explore new places. And that I made a promise to myself to travel as often as I could once I recovered from the shock of being diagnosed with a rare variant of melanoma, amelanotic nodular melanoma, and the excision to get it cut out. For my birthday last year, I got to cross off my 48th state (Vermont) on an epic trip that included Montreal, Boston, Burlington, and a stay at a friend’s house on a tiny lake in northern Vermont. The year before that, I got to explore Washington State (my first time there) and then hop the Amtrak Empire Builder to ride the rails from Seattle to Chicago for my first long distance Amtrak adventure. So this year, I really wanted to plan a trip to Alaska and finally cross off my final state, but…

Well, a couple of things came up. Allegedly my hubby was going to go to some ultra exclusive camp for rich dudes, which is frightfully expensive and so exclusive, they tell you when you can come and spend your money. And that coincided with my birthday. Despite thinking, screw it, I’ll just go to Alaska without him, I knew the grief I would get for that would be more than I wanted to deal with. And then Adam Ant came to the rescue by announcing a summer U.S. tour that very coincidently is scheduled to start on my birthday weekend (and yes, I celebrate my birthday weekend, birthday week, birthday month if I can get away with it). I get to continue my midlife crisis concert tour!

I mentioned before that looking at the dates, I wasn’t too thrilled to see a bunch of general admission spots on his tour. Unless you are a shorter-than-average person, you have no idea what a frustrating experience it is to be stuck behind a sea of tall people who block your view of the stage for the entire concert. But happily, the shows on my actual birthday weekend are scheduled for theaters that have balconies and a sloped floor leading to the stage. So I bought tickets for the three shows that are scheduled over my birthday weekend, two in the first row of the balcony and for the show scheduled on my actual birthday, I splurged and got 2nd row!

But y’all know me… I couldn’t leave well enough alone. So I’m sitting there thinking, well the New Jersey/Connecticut area is nice but that’s not exactly a new place for me to explore. And then it dawned on me that I’m in the one spot in the United States with three major airports clustered together. Surely I can fly somewhere else after my Adam Ant fix, right? So yeah, I am.

After I dance around like a fool and sing my face off for three consecutive nights, I’m flying up to Halifax, Nova Scotia to drive the Cabot Trail, check out of the Bay of Fundy tide action in New Brunswick, and traipse through Anne of Green Gables country in Prince Edward Island. I’ve never been to the Canadian Maritimes before. And like my weird obsession with standing on the Prime Meridian, the Bay of Fundy is one of those geographical spots I discovered very young that triggered my “I want to go there someday” reaction.

I’m now in the stage where I’m reading guidebooks, blogs, and tourist bureau websites to nail down my itinerary and figure out exactly where to do, what to see, where to stay. I love this part of traveling as much as the actual feet-on-the-ground experience. I’ve also made the momentous decision to not work while I’m out gallivanting (I usually work on my travels and I actually haven’t had a trip without my laptop since the Maldives, which is about a year and a half ago.) With everything going on in my really kinda stressful life, I’m looking forward to taking some time out just for me.