Antarctica

Torsten and I have our best conversations while in the car or on vacation (or both). By "best" I mean most productive, the kind that have the real ideas flowing. We always talk, communicate a lot, about daily life and what's going on in the news and how we're feeling, but it's when we're on the open road or lying on the beach that the real problem solving emerges, the goal-setting and the focus-driven discussions.

I think it's because we're relaxed, we're not distracted with quotidian minutiae, and the simple rhythm of a change of pace or the road rushing by helps us focus on the big picture, figure out what we want and how we're going to get it. But we always end up having the big discussions about careers and baby timelines and future goals when we're away, or on the road.

One of the beautiful things about being young and married is the gorgeousness of having our whole lives ahead of us. I know that there is always the possibility that we won't really, that something terrible and tragic could happen, that it seems complacent to feel this way, but it is a beautiful, amazing feeling to see so many years together stretching before you, an as-yet-unbroken surface. I love imagining the closeness, the shared history that we'll have after 20 or 40 years together.

I also love the list we made on our honeymoon, the list of all the places we'd like to travel during our lives. We put everywhere on there, every country or state that either of us had ever thought we might like to visit. At the end it seemed absurdly long, but then we thought, say we go on vacation an average of once per year for the rest of our marriage... well, by the end we'll have hit quite a few of these places.

We MIGHT have gone overboard a tad and privately assigned ranks to our top ten places and then compared and used a complicated formula to rank the order in which we as a couple would like to visit those places. And let's just say that if we did that, we would have found that a cruise to Antarctica was the joint number one, followed closely by a visit to southern Africa. Unfortunately, the ranking list can't make vacation decisions in a vacuum--the budget is a pretty important factor, so our next vacation will likely not be anywhere as exotic as either of those. But someday, during the many sun-dappled years we envision in front of us, we will go to those places. Both of them, and many more.

And just imagine how much great thinking we'll get done while we're there. For that matter, I'm pretty sure we should buy a car right now, so that we can become great scientists or perhaps presidents through the excellent thinking we'll do while driving. If THAT isn't a good reason to purchase a vehicle, I don't know what is.