I love music. Even though I am incapable of doing anything musical, I still cherish listening to a wide variety of music. The musical span goes from classical to popular music. When I am writing or teaching online, I will listen to classical music, because singing quickly distracts me.

Case in point. A couple weeks ago, I posted an essay, My Next Adventure. In four months from today, I will be in Lahore, Pakistan. I will have visited the Khewra Salt Mine with my web administrator’s brother and be getting ready to fly to Yangon, Myanmar in a couple days. Then I will fly to Taunggyi and visit my family.

Khewra Salt Mine

After writing that article about my upcoming itinerary, I started to listen to Willie Nelson’s song, On the Road Again. While that song is listed in the country and western genre, it emotionally resonates with me.

Willie Nelson singing On the Road Again

Take a couple minutes to listen to his song.

On the Road Again

That song describes my drive and excitement to get on my road again. Willie Nelson enjoys being with friends as he is being on the road again. I can’t wait to see my family in Myanmar again. Just to sit and talk with Moh and Ko Ko will be rewarding. However, to be with my granddaughters will be the crème de la crème of moments for me. If Willie can’t wait, he could grasp how I feel. Trust me. It is no different.

The quintessential aspect for me is this couplet that Willie Nelson wrote.

Those two line are the essence of my yearning to travel. I have been on the road traveling to dozens and dozens of countries throughout the world in the past half century. If one were to add up all the time that I have spent traveling overseas, it would be over two years. However, I have a strange fixation about traveling to places that I haven’t been.

Moh Moh, who was my guide on my first trip to Inle Lake in Myanmar, has a sense of places that I love to visit. In my recent essay, My Next Adventure, she wants to take me to Taung Kwe Pagoda at Loikaw. While this will be my third trip to Myanmar in the past six years, it was off my radar screen; I had to look up Loikaw on a map. It is about a hundred miles south of Taunggyi where my family lives.

Taung Kwe Pagoda

If you like traveling abroad, especially to strange and exotic places, you might want to read about Taung Kwe Pagoda upon my return. I can’t wait. It looks mysterious, intriguing, and haunting. There is something about seeing things that I have never seen before. I have tried to grasp the fascination that I have for those places yet unknown to me. Taung Kwe Pagoda isn’t like Notre Dame Cathedral or Westminster Abbey. I have been to most all the major cathedrals in Western Europe. I enjoyed them all. However, I am on a quest to explore what isn’t explored by many Western travelers. That is one of the reasons that Asia captivates me. It is a hunger not for food but for attempting to understand something that is beyond the pale for me.

However, the next line of the song, “ Seein' things that I may never see again” is even more haunting. I’ll be 77-years old a couple weeks after returning to the States in January 2020. I’ve danced with death twice. Trust me. I know my clock is ticking. While “Goin' places that I've never been” is a hunger for me, “Seein’ things that I may never see again” is sobering.

I am fully aware that I am not immortal. That realization, which is staring me in my face, invigorates my drive to travel. I know that someday in my future that I won’t have another day. On my deathbed, I don’t want to realize that I wasted the time of my life. There is an emotional urgency for me being on the road again. I don’t want to regret not seeing all that I could have seen but didn’t take the time.

Wanderlust in my twilight years

If places like Taung Kwe Pagoda at Loikaw drive me, can you imagine what effect my family in Taunggyi has upon me? And I can't wait to be on the road again. I have a wanderlust.

Wanderlust