Travelling

One of my best friends, Andy, left our humble little flat in London last month to embark on touring the world with his girlfriend. To be fair, after four and a half years of researching and writing to earn two little letters in front of his name, he's probably earnt it, but I freely admit to being disgustingly jealous.

He's in the US at the moment and sent me a message on Facebook this week detailing the first leg of his journey. I spent several weeks backpacking round the States in 2002 and so far he seems to have discovered very similar things to me - it's huge, very spacious, pretty stunning to look at, and every city is different. Oh, and Canada pretty much trumps it all.

The vast majority of people that I spent my uni years with have gone travelling at some point in their lives - indeed, I've had the pleasure of going twice, once on my own and once for six memorable weeks across Europe with two other guys. Almost universally, they've all come back saying roughly the same thing - "when I go next time, I'll do....".

The only slight problem is that the annoying 'career thing' has so far got in the way of pretty much all these aspirations. Hence why Andy is only just going now - he's had to wait twice as long as us for the window between education and career.

I'm no different in terms of wanting to go again, but I'm starting to have doubts as to how I'm going to fit it around the 'career thing'. Three years ago, the thought that I'd delay such a trip because I was worried about taking a year out of my career path would have seemed absurd to me, but that seems to have slowly changed as I close in on three years in London.

Whether that's a good thing or not, I haven't quite figured out yet.