nostalgia for somewhere you've never been

The divine Stephen Fry is currently on tv at the mo wandering around a truckers' store somewhere on the I80, and I'm more than a tad jealous.  Not for the I80 exactly, but the next road trip has been pushed back to summer 2010 at last count and I'm missing planning it already...  Wyoming would have been very cool next year, and now I don't even get to harbour that crazy plan to somehow fit ComicCon in there somewhere (hey, it was the same continent, in July!).

Instead there's a plot afoot to cruise the Nile en masse, which proved nigh on impossible to pass up at that point, and I'm trying (and failing, mostly) to work up anything near the anticipation for Australia, er, next week.  Yup, even booking the Sydney Hilton for a couple of nights (my last ditch plan to generate even a tiny bit of buzz) isn't working so well today. Hell, the whole mini Sydney trip was designed for that sole purpose, but it's just all falling a bit flat this week.

I've just never even slightly had Aus in my sights as a destination, and certainly not under these circumstances.  While I've spent the past few months confusing people horribly by announcing the trip with an appropriately  morose expression, I'm getting a tad fed up with being told "you'll enjoy it once you get there." Heh.

Dammit, I travel a lot - there's a reason my savings are pretty damn low, why I still live at home, and why I'm more than happy to work temping rather than permanently: there's rather a lot of the world I'd like to see, and I'd like to go when it suits me.  There's not much point sacrificing other stuff for travel if you're not going somewhere you want to go.. and it's sticking in my craw that I'm making such a long journey for a very short stay at the back of beyond, at a fairly substancial hit on my savings.  When it reaches the point where I'm taking unpaid leave from my new pemanent job so as not to end up owing annual leave days if I leave within six months, it's not really worth it.  But, then, I  already knew that... The family card, as per usual, trumps everything else, so my nervous breakdown will have to wait.

Heh.  It's pretty cool and grey in Perth this week, and hot and rainy in Sydney.  Fingers crossed that the Hilton is all kinds of fabulousness and I  do infact manage to get off the plane with my sanity intact...!