Tag: new_mexico

Looking to the Future

Now that I’m down to actual identifiable years in my travel, I did a quick count of the places I can remember having traveled and the years I went.  It looks like I have enough My Travel Memories posts to get me through until April or May of 2017, not counting the month or so that I will spend on my 2016 vacation.  There might be more.  I have a gap from 1983 through 1986 and if we went anywhere then, I can’t remember it.  So if my dad can find my mom’s old travel journals, that may spark some new memories that I can use to fill in those years.

My plans for my 2016 vacation are Salt Lake City, Fishlake National Forest, the Golden Spike Monument, Yellowstone, and Dinosaur National Monument.  So that will be a little more than a month.

So then I would be in June or July of 2017, which is when I will be taking my 2017 vacation, which is looking to be The Netherlands and Germany (if all goes as planned financially).  That should take me through at least August and probably into September of 2017.   After that?  I don’t know.

And who knows?  Maybe this travel blogging thing will lose its luster by January and I’ll stop in the summer of 1982 or wherever I am by then.  But assuming I’m in this for the long haul (and I’ve been writing with one site since 2011, so I probably can stick this out at least that long), I will keep going at least through 2017.

As of 2017 I will have three weeks of vacation a year at my job.  So maybe, just maybe, I can fit in some smaller trips to new destinations in that extra time.  Maybe if Wild Earth Llama Adventures is still in business by then Alex and I can make a trip to New Mexico . . . .

National Geographic September 2014

I know that I should probably be doing October of 2014, since I’m sort of working my way outward from January of 2015.  This issue has an article on Nero in it, though, and I went to Rome in July of 2014, so I’m skipping ahead a bit.  Also, October of 2014 is probably somewhere in my son’s bedroom.  I’ll get to it once I find it. (note: I found it later, in between two Nature Conservancy magazines.)

The Evolution of Diet, by Ann Gibbons, photographs by Matthieu Paley

The Evolution of Diet talks about the “Paleo diet,” which posits that people should be eating a meat-based diet that limits, or eliminates, beans, grains, and dairy products. The theory is that the human genome hasn’t evolved in the last ten thousand or so years.  It starts out speaking kind of positively about the Paleo diet, arguing that the hunter-gatherers’ inclusion of meat in the diet is part of what allowed us to develop advanced brains.  However, as the article progresses, we get farther from this argument.  Gibbons quotes Amanda Henry, who has found evidence that humans have been eating grains and tubers for at least the last hundred thousand years.  Gibbons also quotes Sarah Tishkoff, who makes the point that humans did not stop evolving ten thousand years ago.  We are still evolving and many populations have evolved to digest lactose and starches that others have not.  Oneof the quotes that is highlighted is “The real hallmark of being human isn’t our taste for meat but our ability to adapt to many habitats and to create many healthy diets.” Continue reading “National Geographic September 2014”