Maybe I’ve spent too much time being an adult and handling my adult responsibilities. Or maybe the calling to be a writer is stronger than being a scientist. Either way, I’ve decided I want to run away from home. Where do I want to go?

1. I would love to tour every National park, monument and point of interest in the US and her territories. This includes the corn mansion, ice palace and every oddity I can find in the states. Why? Well I either watched too many Ken Burns documentaries or I believe there really is something awesome about nature and being a part of it, not standing apart from it.

2. I would love to sail around the world in a cruise ship. It would be fun to write about an outbreak on a ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

3. I would love to visit all those colonial and pioneering villages that show how we lived then. Research people, when the end comes these skills will be great, plus I know where I’ll be shopping.

4. I would love to visit all 10 provinces and 3 territories in Canada. I heard most of them speak American English even if they have the wonky British spelling. Who knows I may be able to see Sarah Palin’s house from there.

5. I would love to visit the UK. It’s about time I learned another foreign language, and besides an apocalyptic novel set on an island that’s great stuff.

6. Europe is calling. I want to walk the cemeteries in France and Belgium, in Flanders and Normandy. I’ll have to visit those on both sides tho. Being an American, it comes with the territory. 

7. I’ll visit Japan where the bombs were dropped and offer a paper dove in a temple. Then leave a poppy on the war memorials and the prisoner of war camps, and visit their haunted forest.

8. I’ll sail south to New Zealand and hang out with hobbits and visit Middle Earth. 

9. I’ll visit Austrailian and the opera house in Sydney and the ANZAC memorial in NSW with its tribute to the soldiers and the nurses who tried to save them. Then I’ll travel to their deserts and remember my home in Arizona.

10. I’ll safari in Africa and dream what North America looked like 15,000 years ago when we had elephants, lions, and other animals of the savannah.

11. I’ll drug the hubbinator on the trip to Machu Pichu and stare down on the blanket of clouds and remember how resilient we are to forge an empire in such a forbidding place.

12. I’ll journey to Antarctica because global warming is bad but global cooling is the apocalypse.

13. I’ll come home full of stories and adventures, and I won’t have made any of them up. 

Life is a journey. Thankfully we get to determine the course we take.