I should be more excited.  Now that I have actually started my journey I am entirely too calm.  I was so excited about this trip months ago but now that it is actually happening it almost seems too surreal, so instead of getting excited I have gone numb.  I will feel something once I get to Panama.  Being in a boring airport is hard to get excited about.

But it does feel good to have everything in order.  Months of preparations and arrangements are done.  The three long days of driving from San Diego to Cincinnati are over.  I was really dreading that.  I really should be happy to be in this moment.  All the work is done. Now all I have to do is enjoy my trip.

Now that I think about it I am pretty excited.  I got about three hours of sleep but had no problem getting out of bed at 3:20 AM.  I also had a hard time falling asleep on the first flight to Houston.  Starting now I’m going to enjoy every possible second of this trip, including the long wait in a Texas airport.  I have a tendency to always look forward to the next really fun thing and then I miss the pretty good thing that I’m doing.  It would be easy to spend this trip looking forward and wondering about the next country or town instead of enjoying the place that I’m currently at.

A few hours later…

Okay, that shit I said before about not being excited was totally wrong.  Now that I’m somewhere over Central America I’m pretty excited.  I slept for an hour and when I woke up we were over the turquoise waters of the Caribbean.  The water was mostly a dark, rich blue with stripes of luminescent aqua.  Then we flew over a dry tan shore that gave way to a flat green country side that was covered in low clouds that look like perfect cotton balls.  I wonder what country we are over.  Guatemala?  Honduras?  Wait, we are back over the water now.  There is a chain of barrier islands.  They are mostly white sand with light brown coral around them.  They form an intricate pattern of swirling spots that is surrounded by every shade of blue imaginable.  This is the best plane ride of my life.

An hour later…

After I wrote that this is the best plane ride of my life it got even better.  We flew over Ometepe, which is an island that is formed by a double volcano.  It’s in the middle of Lake Nicaragua which is so big that it has sharks in it.  This part of the world is awesome.