Thank you to everyone who has looked at my blog.  I truly appreciate it and love you for it!!  Please remember that starting on July 25, the actual travel posts will begin.  Right now, I am still in the planning and executing stages of the trip.  Not as exciting as the trip itself, but I hope to keep you interested enough to keep following so that when the trip starts we can see the country together.

I have been visiting great blogs about women who travel solo.  These women are amazing.  I study where they have gone and what they have done and I am in awe.  I know women who have traveled solo for work and I am in awe.  I know women who have traveled the world in the military and I am in awe.  Meeting and reading about these women is inspiring me to be better and I hope that my small trip (compared to some!) will be interesting to you.  I do have a feeling it will change me and I hope it inspires you to fulfill a dream, whatever it may be.

I have always wanted to travel, but I spent most of my life afraid.  I would think of all things that could happen and I would be paralyzed with fear.  That fear barely let me leave the house for a couple of years. Embracing the fear made me feel better, I thought it actually kept me safe when in reality it just kept me prisoner.  I overcame some of it, but fear still has its grips on me..even today.  But thanks to my brave friends and new friends I am meeting locally and via the Internet, I am casting my fears away, casting them onto the Lord where they belong.

This trip has no political agenda, no hidden meanings or undercurrents, it is strictly about a shy and fearful woman waking from her self-induced small world view and doing something totally out of character with the hopes of being better.  I want to be better on all levels: a better person, a better wife, a better sister, a better friend and a better citizen of the world.  I cannot do that with the blinders I have on.

Thank you again for taking this journey with me.  I think it is going to be a wild ride!