Roll of the Dice

I have been a fortunate soul as of late, and I am truly aware of this fact. For someone with a bad infestation of travel bugs (no, this is not slang for crabs or any other STDs), too little spare income over the past few years to enable me to scratch this itch and a hyperactive daughter that would make a plane full of comatose patients come to and beg to be thrown from the aircraft after two hours, when the opportunity presented itself to once again see new visas and stamps appear in my passport and sample the inebriating substances of foreign lands, well ... what can I say? I took to it like Michael Jackson did to Macaulay Culkin! After a visit this past summer from my friend Jonathan and his minx of a girlfriend (hopefully she will have some appreciation for this comment ... unlike her lack of appreciation for Polish cuisine, which could not persuade her to stay in the country for more than two weeks), I was fully drawn back into the arms of the tourist industry that had previously engulfed my life before my wife and aforementioned extra-bouncy daughter entered the picture. Wait, wait, wait ... now don't take that the wrong way! My beautiful wife and constantly amazing daughter are wonderful additions to my life, but pregnant wife / nursing wife / first child / enough stress to drive a postal worker to extremes + husband travelling = big trouble! You get the idea? Yeah, it doesn't really earn you points saying "Hey, dear ... I know you just dropped a sprog and we are still learning the ropes of rearing a carpet crawler, but I'm gonna ditch my responsibilities and head out of the country for a month and a half. Hope you don't mind!" Anyway, after a break from tourists and extensive travel to allow my kid to become old enough to recognise me as her father (as opposed to just pointing to any male on the street and saying "Daddy"), I have recently found myself in the neighbouring beer-havens of the Czech and Slovak Republics, traversing the birch-filled landscape of the Tran-Siberian to Vladivostok and most recently bruising my skinny arse whilst bouncing through the Ethiopian countryside in a Toyota Land Cruiser. OK ... so I do actually have to work quite a bit during these trips (and some of the people I have to deal with are a hell of a lot of work, let me assure you), but you can't really complain about that too much, can you? The point being, I consider myself lucky. Sometimes life just goes ahead and gives you the lemonade from time to time. Now, if we could just win the lottery ...