Electronic Awakening

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It seems that a whole lot of time has slipped away and before we knew it, December had rolled around. A lot of things had happened since we last traveled but we vowed to take another trip this coming year as we both had so much fun traveling together last year.

Of course the unimaginable seemed to come up with every week that dragged past. I injured myself while trying to maintain a healthy lifestyle, Candace's migraines seemed to intensify and any extra money we seemed to save was paid out for repairs on our cars. Each week, we saw life taking over and slowly forgot that we had promised ourselves another once in a life time trip to South East Asia.

With patience, the injuries started to heal, the headaches diminished and the extra money started to slowly build back up. But our dreams of traveling had been put on the back burner as out of sight became out of mind.

Dreams, like fires need the smallest of encouragement before they blaze brightly. Our dream was to be reawakened with the smallest of things - 2 emails.

Nowadays, we take email for granted. I probably delete 200 of them a day at work and think nothing of deleting 20 of them from my personal email at home. Its another necessary evil of our day to day living.

Read....Delete......Read......Delete.

Perhaps it was me visiting explore.ca or maybe when I searched out traditional Bolivian dances, I doubt I'll ever know, but something triggered the spam email about saving elephants in Thailand. I read it and deleted it. It made me look back at our travel journal.

A spark was set to the dry tinder.

The gust of wind that grew the flame was the email I received from a friend that has been traveling since we graduated high school some 18 years ago. We've always kept in touch one way or another yet this wasn't a typical email from him. There were no tales of his latest adventures, questions about the wife and kids nor any ramblings of two old friends. It had no attachments with funny jokes, pictures or videos. No emoticons or wise tag lines.

His email was three words long!

The Subject line read: Chocolate

The Body read: Where you going?

Nothing more. That's it.

Some would say that perhaps he was concerned about my spiritual well being? Others would suggest that it was the start of a spam. A mutual friend of ours suggested that perhaps he had finally lost it. I knew it was much more simpler than that.

Candace and I had been talking a big game about traveling again this year yet neither one of us had started preparing for it. Sure we had travel guides and websites bookmarked but we had not done anything to make it happen. No tickets booked. No one set up to watch the house. Time not booked off work.

We somehow had forgotten about our trip.

Candace and I realized that we needed to get back on track. We started with tickets and seemed to be stuck paying 3600.00 dollars through our national carrier. I was pretty sure that the price would not be dropping even with the unrest going on in Thailand. Candace wouldn't give up and found a better rate through an agent and we ended up paying 2500.00 for the exact same flights.
Of course this is only the beginning. We have lots to do before we leave but I can say one thing for sure,

We're going back to South East Asia!!!!

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