We’ve got our bags packed, we’ve got bus tickets, plane tickets, and reservations for the first few nights in Bangkok. If all goes according to plan, a couple weeks from now we’ll be on the first leg of a four-month trip, first to Southeast Asia, then to Guatemala.

(When I say that we are packed, that is not strictly true. Faye has a ways to go yet. But, for reasons probably best discussed with a therapist, I am pretty much always packed. So it averages out.)

We’ll be covering some of the same ground In SE Asia we did a couple years ago–Thailand and Myanmar–but we felt like we just scratched the surface last time. Myanmar, in particular, is changing rapidly and we are curious to see the country in transition.

We hope to get to at least one country in SE Asia we haven’t been to before. The only problem is that there are so many that it is hard to choose. We’ll leave it open for now.

Guatemala is familiar territory. We’re going back mainly to touch base with friends and family. We’ll be celebrating New Year’s Eve there, just a day or two after we arrive. That’s assuming, of course, that the world doesn’t end on December 21st, as predicted by an ancient Mayan calendar. I keep thinking there is money to be made buying property from people who think the world is going to end sometime soon, but so far I haven’t figured out how to make that work.

Anyway, stay tuned. It’s going to be a trip.