It’s a cold, miserable, rainy day. Properly cold. Cold like it hasn’t been for months. It is as easy to forget the cold feels in a South African summer as it is for hot to become a distant memory in an icy northern winter. I’m not entirely pleased it has returned.

But still, I thrill with anticipation. Next week I travel to the Western Cape. It sounds so odd to be excited; I have visited Cape Town so often in the last few months. But it still excites me. Every time still excites me, but this especially so. I am not traveling for work. This time is exclusively exploring, being a tourist, seeing friends and a few days in Stellenbosch with some of my favourite people.

I grin every time I think about it. I randomly find myself starting to put aside clothes and consider what shoes to take. I wander the shops and wonder if there is anything I need for my travels. I wait in anticipation. To move, to go, to learn…

And drunk delight of battle with my peers,

Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’

Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades

For ever and for ever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!

As tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on life

Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains; but every hour is saved

From that eternal silence, something more,

A bringer of new things; and vile it were

For some three suns to store and hoard myself,

And this gray spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ulysses