This blog has been sorely neglected in recent months/years. But I want to write, really I do. And sometimes I have more I want to say. But honestly, is it really worth it to type into the ether that is the Internet when the world really is such a scary place these days? I really don’t know.
2024 has been a good year for me and my family in many ways and a terribly stressful one in many other ways. It has been a definite roller coaster of a year. But I figure I’ll focus on some good aspects and one is that we’ve had the opportunity to do some really unique and fun things this year (and no, I’ve not gotten around to scrapbooking it all… *sighs*).
One such thing was a much delayed family/friends trip to Japan. This we did in the spring when it couldn’t have been prettier. And I know that this trip will reverberate in our lives for many years to come. I know it really made an impact on us. We did so many things and explored so much — yes I still do want to go back and explore more, but it really was the perfect length of time to do as much as we had planned to do.
And soon we’ll be off on another adventure more close to home. We’re taking a train ride from one province to the next and we’re going sleeper class so it’ll essentially be by fancy train (very different than the bullet trains and all the other transportation we used in Japan, actually). I’m excited and apprehensive too. Not only will we meet up with some family there (most of whom haven’t met all of our group) but we’ll do some fun things. (Yes, I am being intentionally vague — this is a public forum called the Internet and these days I feel a whole lot less comfortable diarizing my waking life now that I have a family and so on and so forth).
I wish that vacations gave the ability to ignore the real world fully and utterly, but these two trips will do a lot to give us the mental break we need to continue going… just as the much briefer in-province trip to Calgary did in the summer (mostly to do a zoo, science centre, and some amusement park rides plus meet up with a friend).
Anyway, it is a luxury that we’re taking in such great vacation adventures in 2024 despite the setbacks we have had and the frustrations that we’re dealing with. But it is a luxury we’re fully going to take advantage of and hopefully remember to document with photos and whatnot — just maybe not on a fully public platform like the un-filtered Internet.