Vacation

Started: 2014-02-17 17:15:39

Submitted: 2014-02-17 18:02:33

Visibility: World-readable

In which the intrepid narrator contemplates where to go on vacation

I'm having a bit of a top-quintile problem: Where should we go on vacation? Despite my best efforts I haven't convinced my employer to send me anywhere interesting, so I'll have to plan my own trip.

My first thought was Beijing, which is obviously Chinese and sounds like fun, at least to me. Then we remembered that Worldcon is in London this year, but Kiesa's large project had a series of immutable meetings every other Wednesday that makes getting there difficult. (We ended up buying 'supporting' memberships, which let us participate the Hugo nomination and voting processes, so right now I'm working my way through a long list of books to consider nominating, which is worth a long post on its own.) I started working on a list of things that interest me in the UK (with HMS Victory, Lord Nelson's flagship at Trafalgar, now on display in Portsmouth, at the top of the list) and remembered Scotland. I can claim some ambiguous Scottish heritage by virtue of my last name, but the best genealogy anyone's been able to do so far is to trace our Logans back to Illinois in the middle of the nineteenth century.

For the past few weeks I've devoted much of my spare time to figuring out what we might see and do in Scotland. My shelf is full of guidebooks (but only one history so far), and I think I have a working idea of what might work for us, including Calvin, in Edinburgh and the highlands around Inverness. So far it sounds like fun, and I don't even have to try very hard to talk Kiesa into the idea (since it was mostly her idea to begin with).

(I'm still interested in Greater China, but at the moment I'm focusing any future trips on furthering my ambition to relocate there at some point in the future. There are some other development afoot that may impact our relocation timetable, letting me relax my focus for now.)