One day, after I mistakenly added five garlic cloves to the pesto I'd prepared, rather than the one clove the recipe called for, Sylvia announced that the baby was kicking mightily, and what a strange and wondrous thing it is to put your hand on your wife's belly and feel your child moving like an agitated Mexican jumping bean.

It is often said that Americans have no sense of history. Ask a college student who Jimmy Carter was and they will likely reply that he was a general in the Civil War, which occurred in 1492, when Americans dumped tea into the Gulf of Tonkin, sparking the First World War, which ended with the invasion of Grenada and the development of the cotton press.

Escapism, we are led to believe, is evidence of a deficiency in character, a certain failure of temperament, and like so many -isms, it is to be strenuously avoided. 'How do you expect to get ahead?,' people ask. But the question altogether misses the point. The escapist doesn't want to get ahead. He simply wants to get away.

Personally I regard idling as a virtue, but civilized society holds otherwise.

So you've decided to travel around the world. This is an excellent thing to do. It's a precious place, this planet. We should see it.

You can read and read, but nothing eclipses experience.

It is a remarkably easy thing to do, pointing out the faults of others and suggesting remedies or courses of action in an argumentative and pedantic sort of way, and I am still amazed that there are many people in the American media who are paid very big money to do this.

There's a reason that there are oodles of young Aussies, Germans, Japanese, even Chinese backpackers traipsing around the world. They are unencumbered by debilitating student loans. No such luck for the American Theater Arts major with $120,000 in loans.

Few things are more enjoyable than lingering over the atlas and plotting a trip.

I had grown accustomed to life being interesting and adventure ridden and, rather childishly, I refused to believe that this must necessarily come to an end and that the rest of my life should be a sort of penance for all the reckless, irresponsible, and immensely fun things I'd done before.

It was as if the sensory overload that is American life had somehow led to sensory deprivation, a gilded weariness, where everything is permitted and nothing appreciated.

We don't think much about climate change and rising sea levels here in the U.S. Beyond a few gardeners, birders and hikers who notice the changes in our own ecosystem, we live on, blissfully unaware of our changing Earth. Our storms -- Katrina, Sandy -- are dismissed as once-in-a-century events.

The gift of sobriety is clarity and a sense of connection -- and travel only enhances that.

I have been called many things in my life, but if there has been but one constant, one barb, one arrow flung my way time after time, it is the accusation that I am, in essence, nothing more than an escapist. Apparently this is bad, suspect, possibly even un-American.

Like many air travelers, I am aware that airplanes fly aided by capricious fairies and invisible strings.

Don't get me wrong. Sacramento is a lovely place, particularly for those with a fondness for methamphetamines. For the meth-addled, Sacramento had conveniently placed a Greyhound bus station just yards from the statehouse where Austria's finest was sworn in as governor of the great state of California.

I was simply restless, quite likely because of a dissatisfaction with the recent trajectory of my life, and if there is a better, more compelling reason for dropping everything and moving to the end of the world, I know not what it is.

No one who claims this to be a small world has ever flown across the Pacific.