What's next?

OK so it's been a few weeks since I last posted.

In my defense, there were run-off elections coming up and I had to focus on them for the newspaper for which I work.

 The election was held last week, though, and the results were a doozie. The incumbent sheriff, county commission chairman and commission vice chairman were all defeated. Of course the big deal is that Victor Hill, the former sheriff who is awaiting trial on 37 felony counts of wrongdoing during his 2005-2008 term, beat his successor and may retake his old office. the shocker comes in the commission races, which are the ones I covered. People had thought for months that there was a chance the commission vice-chairman -- who is awaiting his own trial on DUI-related charges -- might be defeated, but no one saw the chairman also being at risk until a couple of weeks ago.

Right now, I'm preparing to enter some photographs of past travels in a juried photography competition hosted by the Arts Clayton Gallery in Jonesboro. I entered three photographs of San Francisco in a traveling across America exhibit the gallery hosted over the summer and I got rave reviews for one of my pieces. This time, I've got some photos of Florence, London and Paris that I want to submit. One of them is a breathtaking photograph of a woman selling flowers under an umbrella completely covered in flowers in Montmartre. I took it on a trip to Paris a couple of years ago.

On the travel front, I have a week of vacation left that I have to use before Nov. 14 (the sixth anniversary of my joining the newspaper I work for) or I will lose it. Honestly, I haven't been thinking of where I would go on any vacation this fall because I was so focused on my trip to London, and then the elections since then. I might be tempted to let the vacation time expire but there's just been some unexpected shakeups at work -- which I won't go into detail about in case anyone who reads the newspaper is watching this blog -- that has been making me feel a little blue this weekend. Even though I have to put in a minimum three-weeks notice on vacation requests, I might just need a week away from work. I won't go too far away. I might go to Savannah, or Charleston just to indulge in my photography hobby. It's been a few years since I visited either place. Maybe I'll visit Asheville. I've never been to Asheville and the commercials make it look like a fun little place to visit. I could, of course, use it to visit New Orleans. Even though I used to visit NOLA all the time in college, it's been five years since I last visited the city. Southern Miss' homecoming game is coming up in October ...

What happens with work could impact whether I go to Amsterdam and Brussels next spring as planned. I would hate to have to sacrifice visiting those cities for a second time since I had to cut them out of the trip I made to Europe last month. I have a $227 credit on Delta that is good until June 30, 2013, and I had hoped to use it to cover some of the airfare expenses for a trip to see the tulips blooming sometime from late March until mid-May.

The winds may shift, however, and I may not be in a position to take that trip as planned.

Just a little bit of London

Now that I have been to London twice, I feel comfortable in saying there is very little left that I want to see.

Notice I said "very little", and not "nothing."

There are a few places that I wanted to hit up on this last trip that I wasn't able to work into my schedule. In one case, a place I wanted to see was closed to the public because it is an Olympic venue.

So, here are the things left that I haven't been able to see yet in London:

Hampton Court Palace
The Household Cavalry Museum (it was closed to the public because of the Olympics)
The Royal Observatory at Greenwich
The Palace at Westminster

I also would have liked to have seen the Olympic Stadium and London's Olympic Park, but access at the train station closest to the stadium and the park was limited to only those people who had a ticket to an event at the stadium. Well, that was not me and I had no intention of going to another train station and just walking a long distance to the stadium.

Basically these are not sights that alone (or even as a group) warrant making another trip to London from Atlanta. Maybe if I'm passing through Europe for an extended stay and I get a couple of days where I can make a side trip to London, I'd see those sites, but I can't see myself making a trip to just London for these places. Granted there are other places around England that I would love to visit, such as Hastings, Cardiff (OK, that's technically Wales), the White Cliffs of Dover and Oxford, so if packaged with those, I could see myself making another stop in London.

The reality, though, is that I have a lot of places in Europe that I still want to see.

I want to visit the Netherlands and Belgium.

I want to take a cruise down the Rhine and hike in the Alps (in springtime).

I want to go to Spain and run with the bulls in Pamplona (Hey, in my mind, I could survive that) and participate in La Tomatina in Bunol.

I want to look for the Loch Ness Monster in Scotland and chase the McGratty family history in Northern Ireland.

I even want to engage in an exercise in futility by trying to push straight the Leaning Tower of Pisa.