I want to get away (I want to fly away)

For those clever people, the above is indeed a lyric from the well known Lenny Kravitz song. It should be relevant to a post which has been on the backburner for some time but finally throwing it out there - that is my respect and admiration for those that document these epic journeys, sometimes not even for sightseeing purposes but for raising money for good causes and how I am very jealous of discovering lands anew.

The first thing I saw/read that got me very interested in travelling the globe was reading the travel fiction of Bill Bryson. It's not just the travelling but the whole lifestyle as well. Basically Mr. Bryson would go travelling somewhere with the only limitation being that he would have to produce a book at the end of it. That being said, not everyone can write books like he does, but man what a cool life to live. Just think how great this blog would be if it was something that I did full time, and not throw in 5 minutes here and there.

I also checked out the show A Long Way Down starring Ewan McGregor and his good friend Charley Boorman travelled from Scotland to South Africa on a pair of bikes, followed by a TV crew. They were raising awareness for a number of charities and also had a number of charity events scheduled along the way, but the rest was all unplanned, meeting people, visiting cool places along the way - it was actually very entertaining and interesting television. A lot of times they did grumble about the trip in the "end of day diary" sessions but as they would probably tell you, the good times on the trip clearly outweigh the bad times, or at least that's what it looked like watching.

It's weird that whilst I'm quite scared of the unknown, the main reason why I hesitate such a lot, but I've always really liked the idea of travel, although I could not do it like what my mate Adam did, you can read some of his travels (and check out some pics) over at www.adamswonderfultravels.blogspot.com. He went all over the Far East and I believe he's planning on heading back out to Japan this time. I have a lot of respect for that, to have the motivation to just get on a plane all on your lonesome and go see these faraway parts of the world - it is very cool.

Another charity effort which is a bit closer to myself is the efforts of some of Adam's family. His brother and dad along with some of his dad's friends did something very much like A Long Way Down but on a smaller scale - the aim was to visit 8 capital cities in 8 days on trikes, whilst raising money for the Alzheimer's Society and the NSPCC. The blog and links to help donate can be found over at www.g8globaltour.blogspot.com.

I've always thought that once I am driving, I would be keen on going on epic road trips. My friend Chris Simms from Uni told me stories of the road trip he did down the west coast of America, visiting places like LA and Vegas, damn I was so envious. I would like to go on a road trip round the British Isles to start possibly, before going on an epic trip round America and/or Australia, very much like Bill Bryson above.

Anyways, this is a quick post to highlight some of the efforts which I admire and respect and maybe one day I'll do something similar. Like some of the examples above, I think if I could get some kind of fundraising element into the whole thing, then that would be cool as at least that way someone else benefits from my selfish desire to see the world.

Here's thinking of making all blog posts have song lyrics as their titles.