The Indie Travel Challenge, week 1: "Planning for 2012"

So I'm not much of a planner. Nor am I much of a resolutions person, mostly because - let's be honest - I'm horrible at keeping resolutions. Or follow through with my plans, for that matter. There is one exception, of course: travel planning. I absolutely adore travel planning. I buy Lonely Planet guide books on a whim, whenever I see them, even when I'm not planning a trip. I constantly scan the internet for insipration, as if I needed more crazy ideas running through my head. When relatives ask me what I want for Christmas or my birthday, I usually ask for train passes or more guide books or anything, really, that is travel related. It's a sickness, similar to only one other sickness that I have: cookbooks. But that's another story.

Let's focus on the traveling. And the planning. I read about the Indie Travel Challange while I was browsing the web for my upcoming Paris and London trip, and I thought it would be a fun little (errr... not so little actually) way of pushing myself both as a writer and a traveler. Ever since I moved from Florida to Switzerland I have missed writing the travel articles I used to write for the Naples Daily News, so why not taking up travel writing seriously again? After all, is only one of my two dream careers (the other one being a food writer for a large newspaper).

So here's week 1, a week about planning for 2012. After reading Boots'n'all travel resolutions for the upcoming year, I feel pretty inspired, and ready to share my list. Here's a link to their resolutions and the challenge: http://www.bootsnall.com/articles/11-12/travel-resolutions-to-keep-this-year.html

1. Speak French while I'm in paris, even though my French is poor, to say the list
2. Get lost around the little streets of Bruges, Belgium
3. Eat perfect, greasy, salty fries from a street vendor in Brusselles
4. Try a new dish I've never tried before, everywhere I go
5. Visit all cantons in Switzerland, including the one where I live, which I don't know quite as well as I'd like
6. Take a German class
7. Go to Oktoberfest
8. Buy a ticket to go to Vietnam in January 2013
9. Swim in the Blue Lagoon in Iceland
10. Blog about my travels more consistently

That's it. Well, I hope you all will follow my adventures... as I travel, eat and drink my way around Europe.