< SNL Bears fan voice > Da Friday Five < /SNL Bears fan voice >

1. What's the last place you traveled to, outside your own home state/country?

Well, unless you count brief forays into Texas for shopping (heh...no sales tax on food there, and also all the meat at My Local W@l-M@rt is that nasty brine-shot-up "enhanced" beef and pork), it was traveling to Illinois to visit my parents a couple weeks ago.

2. What's the most bizarre/unusual thing that's ever happened to you while traveling?

The only thing I can think of off the top of my head is the time I was going home for Christmas on the train, and it was not only after an ice storm, but a freight ahead of us derailed, and because it was a Sunday, they couldn't get a crew out to clean it up.

we were 12 hours late in arriving. As in, I was supposed to get to my parents' house shortly after 1 pm, and it wasn't until 1 am that the train actually arrived in the station (despite that I still love Amtrak and prefer it for traveling long distances)

3. If you could take off to anywhere, money and time being no object, where would you go?
Oh, I don't know. I'd love to go see Ireland and visit the places my ancestors came from. I'd also love to take one of those "Inside Passage" cruises they do in Alaska. I'd also be happy with going to a luxury hotel in a big (but fairly safe) city and spending a week shopping and visiting museums. Or doing a yarn-and-quilt-shop crawl 'cross country.

4. Do you prefer traveling by plane, train or car?
train is the first preference, car is second (if someone else drives, and if that someone else is amenable to stopping regularly for snacks/stretching legs/to check out an interesting shop or museum along the way). I do not like to fly (even before anyone conceived it possible a plane could be used as a weapon of mass destruction and terror) and I am less likely to want to fly now, considering the security enhancements that have become necessary.

5. What's the next place on your list to visit?
Oh, I don't know. Travel-season is over for me now - it's time for school to start. I suppose when the weather cools down a bit and I've saved up a bit more mad money, I'll head back down to McKinney, or out to Longview some weekend. Or maybe my next trip will be up to Boiling Springs for the OAS field meetings.

It's almost the weekend. Yay. I finished two rewrites this week - one is a paper nearly ready to go out for publication (please God let this one be accepted) and the other is a research proposal.