A Dream Soon To Be Realized

I've long-wanted to take one journey in particular: a journey of realization. The kind of excursion where I experience places that I have only read about, or seen snippets of on television.

I'm speaking, of course, of my upcoming Pilgrimage. I've thought about & wanted to do this for a long time, as evidenced by this blog entry a year & a half ago. Oh how naive I was about the costs, or at least of the Fed's ability to regulate inflation. Gas will NOT be cheap. Neither were these:


Beautiful, aren't they?

Anyway, this pilgrimage was always something I had in the back of my mind that I'd do "someday." You know -- "Oh, yeah, I'm gonna get to that... someday."

A popular, recently-released movie, "The Bucket List," serves to remind us that sometimes someday never comes. Lucky for the two characters in the movie that they got to do some of the things they always wanted to do in life before they "kicked the bucket" -- ergo the moniker "Bucket List." A soon-not-to-be local friend in ministry (just the local part... hopefully not the friend part) was inspired by the movie to contemplate his own bucket list on his blog. In doing so, he inspired me.

So, in almost a week, I will be the envy of all my married buddies as I trek from city to city to admire the cathedrals of our Nation's Pastime. I've bought all my tickets. I got my rental car reserved. And thanks to Uncle Sam's stimulus check & inheritance from Mom, I also have plenty of discretionary income to patriotically spend along the way.

(Don't worry, Mom -- I already took a bunch of it & filled up my IRA. You didn't raise a dummy!)

"Getcha Popcorn Ready"

I hope to be able to journal at least a little each day about my reflections of each experience on my "Ballpark Pilgrimage" blog, which I linked to above. There's also a link on the side panel under "Me Elsewhere." Also, this will be the first time I will have ever been north of North Carolina. So I hope to experience a little bit of Americana along the way, also.

Anyway, for those of you who read me via RSS, you may want to go ahead and add that blog to your reading list. And as for you non-RSS readers, I also wanted to let you know so you can start checking that blog regularly for entries. I even plan on being very open about costs & such, so I'll fill in those of you who are interested on the logistics of such an undertaking as this. A little FYI: when I make it to Manhattan, I will NOT be eating THIS.

So, I hope to share as much of the joy of this Pilgrimage with you as I can. I don't have a digital camera, though, so I guess I'll have to write a few thousand extra words to make up for it. But I hope you follow along, and I hope it inspires you to start pursuing the items on your bucket list as well.