My travel year: a look back and a look forward

So here we are on the penultimate day of 2009. It was a pretty good travel year for me. I spent six months in Oxford and made a lot of friends there and got to hike the length of Hadrian's Wall. I also spent some time in Missouri and spent a long weekend in Amsterdam, doing some research in Delft and a couple of Dutch castles.

The year 2010 is shaping up to be even better. In fact, it will be the best year since my big Kumbh Mela year of 2001! I'll be spending seven weeks in Ethiopia, and Almudena will be joining me for three weeks so we can celebrate our anniversary. I'll also be headed to Rome for some research, doing the usual stop in Missouri, a couple of months in Oxford, and another long weekend in Amsterdam. I can't miss Amsterdam, after all! I'm also hoping to meet my friend Thomas somewhere in North Africa as he's on his final leg of his trip across Africa as part of the Africa Heart Beat Project. If we can't make our schedules jive, I'll probably end up spending a week in The Gambia.

What will 2011 bring?

Back to a different Oxford

I spent most of last week in The Netherlands doing some research for my next book and writing articles for Gadling. I had a great time and managed to see the grand opening of the Amsterdam branch of the Hermitage. I'll be posting more articles on Gadling next week, including a feature on Delft and one on Dutch castles.

Now I'm back in Oxford, but it's not the same as when I left. Two weeks ago the students were in the throes of exams. Now they're finished and most have left, to be replaced by ever-increasing hordes of tourists. I'll miss not having the students around; they are a big part of the atmosphere in any university town, and now that term has ended there will be fewer functions at the university. The best lecture I saw was by archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson about his Stonehenge Riverside Project. There won't be any more of those until September. Now I'll have to deal with big crowds of people walking agonizingly slowly through the center of town.

So far it hasn't been so bad. I suspect the economic downturn has slowed things down. Amsterdam had noticeably fewer people than when I last visited, and my traveling companion who was there last November said it was even slower than before, strange considering he was last there in winter and now it's summer. Maybe bad economic times will give me some respite from the tourist hordes this summer.