Pre-boarding – SFO to London

I didn’t make my first trip out of North America until I was twenty nine years old, (just after I graduated college, but that’s a long story). My wife sold her car and we used the money for a month-long trip to Europe, and the travel bug bit. We wandered the continent like we knew what we were doing, and still talk about that trip. Since then, we go where we can when we can, dragging our amazingly intrepid daughter along – we’ve lived in Japan, taken trips to Southeast Asia, been to Europe a number of times, stuff like that.

Among my colleagues, this puts me about in the category of those old people you hear about who’ve never left the holler. I’m the equivalent of a toothless guy rocking on the porch, smoking a corncob pipe, who’s been dreaming of making the trip over the next ridge, and maybe before I die, all the way to Wheeling. Many of my colleagues spend almost as much time in Europe, Asia, and Africa as they spend at home. These are serious, badass travelers. We even have friends who moved to Yemen! For me, a trip to Africa makes my mouth a little dry.

Basically, what I know about Africa I learned from the television show Bizarre Foods, in which a profoundly color blind guy (judging from the collision of pastels that makes up his wardrobe) spends afternoons singing throat clicking songs in far-flung villages, eating weird food like this kind of stew made partly from dirt (not kidding) or drinking blood from the neck of a live cow (also not kidding). I have a feeling that they edited out the part where the host is doubled over, retching into a ditch somewhere, and has to be airlifted out for organ transplants. Anyway, while I harbor such goals in life, I’m not quite there yet. And I have a feeling that I may not do any throat clicking on this trip. In fact, I don’t know what to expect.