The itch begins between the temples, reverberates back and forth inside your head until your eardrums start tingling and your eyes start to burn.  No, you can’t scratch this itch, it’s deep in your subconscious.  This itch gnaws at you and you can’t explain why you can’t sit still. Everything should be cool, you tell yourself, but it just isn’t because you’re a maelstrom of activity on the inside.

This is post holiday cabin fever.

Wanderlust is ever-present, I’m constantly dreaming of getting away for a while.  In these dreams I travel solo.  No wife. No son. No one but me.  The destinations vary — sometimes I’m fishing flies in a cold river in the mountains, sometimes I’m sailing solo around the Chesapeake, sometimes I’m on my bike cresting a ridge in the Appalachians — but I’m always solo.

I’ve never followed one of these dreams.

Recently, I told Mrs. TKD that this was the year for a big fishing trip.  I don’t know where it will be, or when I’ll go, but consider it on the books.  I suppose this is a fourth goal for 2011.  And with that in mind, I better formulate an action plan, or this dream will collapse in the vortex of life. I’m not gonna let that happen this year.

I don’t know where. I don’t know when. But I am going somewhere solo sometime in the next 363 days.