Year in Review

originally posted on 1/1/07

I'm not really one to review calendar years based on random statistics and chart-able quantities (a total lie, really) but 2006 was pretty different from every other year I've had, so I'm going to bore you and talk about that. Don't worry, my Hong Kong blog is coming soon, filled with drunken anecdotes and Stong references, so that should be a crowd pleaser.

Anyway, travel-wise, my 2006 stats are pretty impressive, at least to me, so I'll throw out a few. Over the year, I spent time in 11 countries (USA, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Czech, Italy, Korea, Japan, and China), a personal record. I visited 11 World-Class, top tier cities (Chicago, Washington DC, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Brussels, Munich, Vienna, Prague, Venice, Seoul, and Hong Kong), another record, including 7 world capitols (record). In these places, I went to 40 museums/cultural sights, second only to 1999's ridiculous 53. Stateside, I took one proper long distance roadtrip, and went to 3 different baseball stadiums. I lived in 3 cities, visited 16 cities that I had not been to prior to this year, and took an estimate 20 trips of some type or another in all, accounting for 60 some travel days.

I flew on a record (at least dating back to when the old man had a pilot's license in the early 80s) 17 flights, to a record 13 airports, on a record 6 different airlines (Southwest, Scandinavian, KLM, United, Korean Air, and Cathay Pacific), probably largely because a record 11 of those flights were free. Strangely, the only place that I actually paid to fly to more than once last year was Lawrence/Kansas City.

Most amazingly of all, though I do have some credit card debt (but not a crippling amount) I managed to pay for all this travel by working a record low 120 days in all of 2006. Yep, 245 days off last year. Which is not to say I did no work on all of those days, a lot of the time I was looking for jobs. Then again, there were probably more days that involved waking up at 3, 4, 5 p.m., getting some tacos, watching some TV, going out to the bars, and coming home to play video games until 6, 7, 8 a.m. last year than at any point since college.

So, it seems logical to ask after all these statistics, was 2006 my best year ever? Easy - of course not. It would crack the top 5, I imagine, but it's not number one by a long shot, or even 2 or 3. Why not? One more statistic: Girlfriends in 2006 - 0 (sadly, this only ties a record.)

If you made it this far, thank's for reading. And again, I swear, I'll make it up to you next time. Have a neat 2007. I'll be spending the whole of mine in Seoul, doing a whole lot more work than last year.