When I was forty-one years old, I bought myself a backpack and an around-the-world air ticket and took off for points east. From the northern hemisphere to the southern, and back again, always toward the rising sun, I traveled for months.

Every few weeks, I'd hop on and off another plane, arrive in another city in another country and be presented with the same initial conundrum, as chore number one was always to try to sort out how to get from the airport to a room where I could divest myself of the thirty kilo carapace that contained my worldly goods.

I was on my own, traveling light, with no schedule. I rarely paid attention to the time or the date, had no idea how much I weighed or how far away things were, how hot or cold it was, what the money I exchanged for goods was actually worth, and often had little inkling of what was happening in the world around me. Measures were all metric, temperatures were in Celsius, currency went from dollar to frank, rupee, rupiah and more (or less, depending on the conversion rate of the day), and the news came in languages I didn't understand.

The Internet was reserved for universities and such back then ... there were no Internet cafés or personal computers for traveling ... and in many places international phone calls could only be placed from special offices where long queues were the norm and costs were outrageous.

It was 1993, and I was one of a legion of world backpackers filling cheap guest houses, eating street food, looking for nothing, open to much. Most, however, were twenty-somethings fresh out of college getting some life under their belts before falling into the lock-step of chosen careers and assumption of positions at the heads of families of their own.

I came to my travel from the other side of the tossed coin. I'd seen two kids to adulthood, worked my way up ladders, sold a business I'd birthed, babied and eventually tired of, and was approaching adventure more as relief than revelation.

Anyone familiar with my personal story knows something of the monumental changes that my year-long travels precipitated; in essence, it was a whole new life I got out of the deal, and very little of the old one remained once the ramifications of my circumnavigation of the globe settled down into what became my new day-to-day.

I'm not, however, writing today about steps from then to now ... each one obviously simply placed in front of the last in a logical progression to the present ... from that forty-one-year-old woman fitting as much into life as possible.

No. I'm writing today about how tired I am after just one week of vacation.

Continued in the next post.