Vamanos!

On this, the eve of my epic, end-of-medical-school tour, I wanted to figure out a way to keep up with my travel blogging. I've been doing it for the past three years, through Tanzania, India, and Malawi, and I find it to be a darn peachy way of organizing my own thoughts and keeping me mindful of the life I'm leading in these places. Perhaps even more importantly, it spares my family the necessity of either reading a generic update email or hearing my same travel stories over and over again. A travel blog is a delightful buffet of adventure stories: readers come and take as much as they want, but no more.

I've been writing over at Innervated for all my previous travel blogging, but all those trips were medically related - the places, stories, and people are very different than if I'd just been on vacation. It feels a little jarring to switch from posts about blood shortages at the Malawian hospitals to updates about the quality of paella in Madrid.

Hence this new one! The title comes from Roald Dahl's biography "Going Solo", where he describes all the loony, empire-building British as "sinewy, sunburnt gophers" - which I often find to be a pretty apt description of me at the end of my travels.

So just a teaser of the upcoming itinerary: One month! Three countries! One adjacent Mediterranean sea! Two medical school companions! One travel-savvy mom! NO CHECKED LUGGAGE!

I expect to smell pretty awesome at the end of this.