Experience Overseas

Us humans really aren't as good at perceiving time as we think we are. A year, ten years and five minutes all go by and they feel the same to us. We know that things have happened and time has passed but our minds can never quite seem to grasp the weight of it. Our memories stretch and compress the bits of our life that have already happened, until they are way out of proportion.
As for the future, we make plans and expect things but it's always like a slap in the face when they actually arrive. The future is like one of those colouring-in books we used to have as children, the ones where you just washed water over the lines with a brush and the colours would come out on the page, grey-tinged pastels on a newsprint background and cartoonishly thick black outlines. A pale, insubstantial and two dimensional image of what's to come.
So when you're leaving the country, you speak of 'it hitting you'. It hasn't hit me yet, and won't until I'm on the plane thousands of feet in the air, that I'm actually going to a real foreign country. And then another, and another. Am I excited? Sort of, but only in the distant future of next week will it hit me. And those foreign countries are just like the colouring-in books and my grasp on the future: exaggerated and slightly mythical, but as yet still very translucent.

I am going to blog my adventures and misadventures as much as possible, or as much as I can be bothered because I will probably have more interesting things to do on my journey. Please do watch this space and leave me comments so I feel vindicated in my ramblings. It's nice to know that people are listening.
And here is a list of fun synonyms for travel:
sojourn
pilgrimage
voyage
mission
expedition
tour
progress
migration

And here is some brief trip information:
With mother. Fly out of AK 19/9/09 to London, train to somewhere in the North nearish Carlisle. Friends and relatives. Glasgow. Art and buildings. Denmark. Dad's friend Fred. More art and buildings. Eurail pass! Germany. Berlin. Munich. Oktoberfest! Austria. Italy. France. Spain. France. Belgium? England. Mother leaves. Germany? England? Ireland? The world?
Home.