Cue background music:  Mamas and Papas “California Dreaming.”

Cue soap box speaker:  I am chewing over two big travel dreams/plans that I need to share.

First, Summer 2016: A week in NYC to visit family and see Hamilton (Yay!) and then 5 weeks in Italy.  Or 4 weeks in Italy and a week in and around London.  Just the tiniest bit anxious about this because I want to buy the airline tickets, not cheap but decent.  Which will change soon.  The week in and around London would be to spend time with Cheshire who will be in Cambridge for a wedding.

Second, Summer 2017-2018: A year abroad.  Julia will be finished with middle school.  I have been pondering taking her out of school for a year to travel.  Using it like a gap year (yes, early, I know) and returning to put her into ninth grade.  Lots of logistics to work out education wise.

I would love to bring another adult to tutor Julia and will be looking for that someone.  I can’t afford to pay much but I can buy plane tickets plus room and board.  We could use some online education programs for math and literature.  I am hoping to find an art enthusiastic who can teach either art history and/or drawing, painting, etc. related to our travels.

Another option for Julia would be to find a school for her for some time — a semester, perhaps.  Some arts and crafts high school or incredible program for kids with autism or just some incredible program.  It could be anywhere.  Anywhere interesting would be my preference.

The big question is where to travel to.  I always imagined living in Venice for a year but these days I am thinking of a few months in a few places.  Somewhere in Italy for sure.  Venice is wonderful like NYC is wonderful, hard, gritty, expensive and needing lots of chutzpah.  I don’t know if I can summon that much nerve.  Venice nerve plus travel for a year with Julia nerve.  I have chutzpah limits.  I visited Turin last summer, and probably this summer again, and like the city a good deal.  And I have a friend there which would be nice to start out with that kind of support.  It almost sounds easy.

Other places that have come up over and over in my head are Costa Rica, Bolivia and Australia.  These are countries, one a continent!  Another thought is somewhere in Aisa.  Julia is not ready to visit China.  I have always wanted to visit India.

Spinning wheels.  Dreaming dreams.  Wondering if I can make it real.  Just writing it down here, pressing the publish button feel like a step.  This is more a declaration than a step towards anything.  Except for buying this years place tickets.  Gotta’ do that and leave the bigger dreaming to percolate on its own.

p.s. (Somehow this feels much more like a letter than a blog post and so the p.s. seems appropriate.)  Comments, advice, suggestions, shocked disapproval are all welcomed.  One of the interesting things about being a crazy-old-widow-lady is that there is no one  sleeping in this house who can immediately quash wild dreams with practicalities.  So, I send my crazy, wild dreams out to the universe and wait to see what will come back.