Monday Mood: Getting Around

With a title like The Adventures of Travel Penguin, I guess there should be some getting around on this blog. Someone asked how many airline flights I have taken, I wish I had kept track I know it is in the hundreds.   

Let me see if I can remember how many trips I have made across the Atlantic.  London 1990, Paris 1991. Rome (the photo above), Oxford, Paris, Normandy, Greece, Normandy, Rome, Germany, Ireland, Spain, Iceland, Iceland, Provence - I think 15 trips to Europe from the Untied States, with another trip scheduled for next spring.  

I have been to all 50 US states. Canada, the Bahamas, and Mexico. The list above does not include all of the countries visited on each of those trips, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria and Vatican  City would round out that list.  

I always learn things or observe things when I travel.  Differences in the landscape, cultural differences, differences in food, and attitudes.  I never really understood immigration from Mexico. Why would someone leave a wonderful warm and dry climate for  Toledo, until I saw the unbelievable poverty in Mexico. It makes flipping burgers at McDs look like a career choice. I didn't really understand working to live, rather than living to work, until I experienced the lifestyles of Spain and France.  

I have kept a record of all of the hotels I have stayed in since 2005.  This year will be a new record high for the number of nights in hotels in a year.  All told in the last 19 years, over 750 nights in hotels, about two out of the past nineteen years have been spent on the road. 

I do get around.