It is so good to be back and, boy, do I have lots to say about traveling after just returning from Italy! What an adventure this has been for my husband and I! This month’s m challenge, as you may have guessed, is all about travel! I have lined up some great writers to join us this month and share their best travel tips for you as well as some of my own pieces on making the most of your travel dollars.
As I have gotten older, I have a new appreciation for travel. As we whittle away at the clutter in our home and buy less, we have allocated more money towards seeing the world together. My parents often remark on how they never envisioned me traveling so much (often alone for work) and how easily I can do something that I was always scared of. My job has forced me to get over the intimidation that I had about traveling and now I feel like a bit of a pro at the airport.
Each month I will be sharing a book selection that you can read that goes along with our theme for the month and this month’s book is, The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner. Part foreign affairs discourse, part humor, and part twisted self-help guide, The Geography of Bliss takes the reader from America to Iceland to India in search of happiness, or, in the crabby author’s case, moments of “un-unhappiness.” The book uses a beguiling mixture of travel, psychology, science and humor to investigate not what happiness is, but where it is. Are people in Switzerland happier because it is the most democratic country in the world? Do citizens of Qatar, awash in petrodollars, find joy in all that cash? Is the King of Bhutan a visionary for his initiative to calculate Gross National Happiness? Why is Asheville, North Carolina so damn happy? With engaging wit and surprising insights, Eric Weiner answers those questions and many others, offering travelers of all moods some interesting new ideas for sunnier destinations and dispositions.
I look forward to reading along with you and exploring these topics with you and with our guest authors this month!