Yes, Virginia, there IS a passport for that!

This week’s wonder is prescient for me, too, but not because of the lottery. I adore my job and just yesterday told Wicked M that I plan to retire from it (also at about age 80 like G Love speculates may be her fate) … but, to put it mildly, work has been extremely difficult lately. I won’t go into details here, but if you want a long, sad, boring-to-anyone-but-me story about all of it, call me.

Anyway. Until this moment, I hadn’t considered what I might do instead.

I’d have to do something, because I am a sloth. When left entirely to my own devices with no plans and no tasks that must be accomplished, I will vegetate like a champ. I might mix it up a little and read instead of just watching TV, but I will still be sitting down and moving very little apart from my eyes and hands (turning pages or pushing buttons on the remote). That’s my natural state. It doesn’t occur to me to randomly go for a hike or ride my bike somewhere or even take a drive to explore. Well, I’ll actually explore the kitchen and wander around in a little circle for a minute or two if there’s nothing worth eating, but then it’s right back to the couch.

So I’d want to travel, especially if The Boy also got to be work-free and we could venture afield together. We have a goal of wanting to camp in (or as close as one can get to) every single US National Park, of which there are 59. While we have visited a few more, we have camped in only three (we’ll have bagged #4 about a month from now). So that would take up a nice chunk of time, especially considering that there’s one as far away as Guam. And especially considering quite a few of them are in Alaska, which means timing is everything. And extra-especially considering I’d have to make it home for some proper in-my-own-bed sleep in between each trip. The entire enterprise would take a couple of years but would be so very worth it.

That’s what I’d do, fearless readers: sleep on the cold, hard ground inside a nylon dome after spending the day tramping up and down and around and through and under and over. Because it would be, as my little sister Kat would say, “stinkin’ beautiful.”