It's exactly one month until I go overseas.
One month.
That's 31 days.
31 more days of twiddling my thumbs, frugally counting every dollar and shamefully abusing my journalism skills by investigating every minor detail I can dig up about Appel Farm, my summer camp and soon to be home away from home.
And don't even get me started on the Facebook stalking. Needless to say, it's hitting an all time high. Is it so wrong that I want to see who my fellow counsellors will be and what the camp looks like, based on the thousands of photos posted between 1960 and now?
I don't think so.
Now that the count down is really on, now that I am a mere month away from traveldom and can almost feel the aeroplane cabin air sucking the moisture out of my face, I'm getting excited. Really excited. The kind of excited that keeps you up at night (no kids...not THAT kind of excited...) but the excited that gives you verbal word vomit wherein you can't speak, write or dream about anything else.
And I'm not kidding about the dreams either. I am a woman obsessed.
I tried to put it off for as long as possible by denying myself the excitement. I tried pushing camp and my inevitable travel plans to the very back of my mind and not indulging in them. Partly, because I was worried that if I gave into the excitement, I wouldn't be able to live with myself. For six months, I would have to put up with this rabid excitement eating away at every aspect of my life.
No, I wouldn't be able to live with myself. And neither would anybody else.
But the excitement eventually found me. It sniffed me out, jumped up on to my lap and wagged its tail while looking longingly into my eyes. So I gave in and allowed the excitement to make itself at home.
And has it ever.
Hence the word vomit. Now that I am no longer living in travel denial, all I can think about is camp. All I can talk about is camp. All I can facebook stalk is, you guessed it, camp. I am obsessed and greedily hungry for any smackeral of information I can get my hands on. Every photo, video or review brings me that little bit closer to working out what is in store for me - who I will meet, what I will do, who I will be. And the more information I find, the more the excitement intensifies and even if I try to abstain, the excitement ends up power spewing all over the people I love.
But after everything that's happened in my attempt to make this adventure possible, I figure I'm allowed to be excited. I'm allowed to do a celebration dance simply because I purchased my backpack today (I actually did - both purchase my packpack today and do a celebration dance). I'm allowed to toss and turn all night because I can't stop going over every detail in my head. I'm allowed to let the excitement in.
I'm allowed, because just like buying your first pack and crying at the gate of the airport and taking a million photos nobody else cares to see, it's part of the backpacker's rite-of-passage to be excited.
And to make everybody else jealous.
Ciao for now. xo
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