Anyway, here are some resolutions brought to you by your editor and creator of your favorite travel blog:

1.  2012 will be the start to a soon-to-be expanded My Travel Hats! Editorial plan still in the works.

2. I will be documenting more places to travel. So far I’ve been sent requests for Istanbul, Budapest, Delhi, Boston and southern California.

3. I will find myself in a foreign country sometime this year. I don’t know when.

4. I will report back what it’s like to drag a small infant around through airports and all the unnecessary necessities to pack along.

Any other requests, please let me know! Happy new year everyone!

Still, I had to lug my luggage around the airport by myself for a while, since I was traveling alone. Fortunately I only have about three pieces of maternity clothing that fits at all, so that’s all I packed into a roomy laptop briefcase, along with several snacks. A month ago  Jon and I flew down to the island of Anguilla, and even though he was there to drag our suitcase around and help me out, we still managed to get a bit of star treatment.

It’s amazing how a protruding belly can suddenly get in the way of a lot of ordinary habits. For example:

• You can’t lift your own luggage to put in the overhead anymore
• You can barely bend over to access the bag under your seat
• Airline seats are designed to make you hunched over, which is even worse when all your want to do is bend in the opposite direction (and there are no pillows or blankets to be found anymore)
• You and the tray-table compete for space, especially when the guy in front reclines his seat. Makes typing on a laptop difficult
• If you don’t have an aisle seat, your neighbors start to hate you for needing to pee every 20 minutes.

Some benefits, however:

• I ended up on a “priority lane” at the TSA security point and skipped ahead of everyone, and nobody questioned me
• Nobody saw me naked on those new X-ray machines since I opted for a pat-down instead
• The pregnant belly distracts people enough so they don’t notice you are still wearing a cardigan or have three carry-on items as you enter security.
• People feel sorry for the solo pregnant traveler.

Some tips for pregnant travelers:

• Pack light. Seriously. You can’t expect someone else to do all your hauling, even your spouse.
• You already look disproportional and weird, so don’t worry what your shoes look like. Sneakers go a long way. Wear them in the airport.
• You already look disproportional and weird, so don’t worry what your clothes look like. Pack light. Pack few. You probably don’t own much that fits anyway. Less is easier to haul around.
• Bring snacks. Lots of them. Granola bars, saltines, pretzels, fruit, raisins. And bring enough for your husband who will have “sympathy hunger”.
• If you’re going to a beach, just wear a bikini and ignore the comments more conservative people make about pregnant bellies and bikinis. There were plenty of potbellied men on the beach who looked like they could go into labor any minute, and I think I looked better than they did. Same applies to overweight women.
• Bring Tylenol (for headaches), ginger candy and/or tiger balm (for nausea), hand sanitizer and drink lots of water.
• Give yourself plenty of time before your flight. You really don’t want to be racing through the airport, even if you’re wearing the sneakers I recommended.
• Have fun. This is going to be nothing compared to the next time you travel, which is with a kid and all the accoutrements kids come with.

(This is a picture of my friend Boris on the bike we rented in Goa, India – in reference to the way we “prayed” in India (or didn’t pray, just had fun like normal people)

It is an unbelievable summer: we have no travel plans! In fact, this is the first summer neither of us have weddings – which means every weekend is open, available, for adventure (we do have three for next year). The other reason we are entirely free is because I used up all my vacation time for China this past April, and partly because we decided maybe we should be grounded for summer after all the hubbub that’s been circulating our lives since December.

As a poor substitute, I sit around reading Food & Wine magazine for their latest recommendations in travel and watch bad TV on our new (and terribly serviced) Comcast. Last night I watched about 15 minutes of Eat Pray Love before I had to switch channels because she bothered me so much. Now, I like Julia Roberts, but the woman she was playing was particularly annoying (apparently the author of this memoir). Ooh, she’s tired of supporting her husband and wants to travel the world! She goes to Italy to – eat! No way! and then to India to – pray! Is she Hindu now? Does she think doing yoga makes her spiritual now? And then I don’t comprehend the Indonesia part to love – she wants to meet an Indonesian? Why does it have to be Indonesia? Hasn’t she been reading the State department warnings about traveling to Jakarta? It’s also incredibly expensive to do all this stuff. I don’t feel very sorry for her. In fact, I’m rather jealous that she got to travel the world for a year, although I would have taken Jon along because it’s more to explore things together. (To be fair, I only watched about 15 minutes, but that was all I could take).

That doesn’t mean that I don’t sit around dreaming of our next escape. For example: how can we go to Cuba legally? Should we go to Maui or Kauai over Thanksgiving? Maybe we can take a wine trip to Bordeaux for a week! Or what’s the latest we can go on an Alaskan cruise? And did you see -the Westin in Paris is on sale through Travelocity for 199 euros a night (a steal for that hotel – but I still prefer staying in a Parisian apartment with a kitchen so we can take advantage of the farmers markets).

Photo: Sunset over the Serengeti.

We’re finally back and fairly jetlagged! Jon fell asleep in the middle of eating his burger last night but we managed to sleep through the night, even though our bodies are about 7 hours ahead. And oh, the things we take for granted here in America. The things we take for granted! It took us about 45 minutes to get back to my sister’s house from Dulles Airport – the same distance the Maasai village was from Nairobi, yet it did not involve super dusty dirt roads with potholes  and giant rocks for miles on end. I absent-mindedly flushed the toilet – flushed the toilet! and brushed my teeth with the tap running  (although I should have turned it off, I know). And pulled food out of the refrigerator  and stood around munching on a variety of items. Then I piled all our clothes into this machine that – imagine this – washes the clothes for you! One of the Kenyan staff of the volunteer organization, who was a city girl herself from Nairobi, commented on how nice it was that we Mzungas (white people, or non-black foreigners) had these machines that washed your clothes while you sat around sipping a cup of coffee.

Our flight home was interesting: in Zanzibar, my luggage was stopped at security for seashells, seashells… not the liter of water Jon was carrying or the nailclippers they tried to find in Ethiopia security… but my seashells. However, for a small tip, I can still remove them out of the country.

Then we flew from Zanzibar Island to Dar es Salaam (a nice 15-minute flight in a Boeing 737) and then to Addis Ababa where we changed planes and wandered the gift shops for Ethiopian treasures that looked suspiciously like Kenyan and Tanzanian and Indian ones, then to Rome for a quick refueling of our jet although I was asleep for all of Rome. Then finally back to Dulles, where my brother-in-law and niece kindly picked us up from the airport and we took hot showers and drank water from the tap.

I’ll post more stories about our adventures, and I’m sure the novelty of electricity and running water and all that will wear off quickly. In the meantime, I have to figure out how to get pictures of my defunct memory card (everyone pray that I am not about to lose all my Africa pictures!) but here are some from Jon’s point-and-shoot, when we wanted to be discreet. People did NOT like having their pictures taken, even if you were just taking a picture of the street.

Jumping around to a Maasai song by the crocodile park in Nairobi

Zebras in Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania (they stand this way to keep watch for predators)

Me, trying to appear like a nonchalant shopper at the market in Arusha, Tanzania.

We’re now in Dar es Salaam, staying at our friends Natalia and Brian at their new place by the ocean which is clean, white and sparkling (her apartment, that is). Brian works for a coffee company and Natalia is a nurse at one of the new emergency rooms (a new concept here). We took real showers and slept in their spare bedroom and are learning much about Tanzania. We head out by ferry to Zanzibar tomorrow, land of white sand beaches lining the Indian Ocean. Of course, I don’t need another tan, because after looking in the mirror for the first time in five days I realized I had gotten pretty dark. Dark or dirty, it is unclear.

All of this… fits into below.

Hark. We’re driving to Chicago. In a car. From Baltimore. I don’t know why this is such news, considering I did this route many times between St. Louis – New York during college, and Chicago- New York during graduate school, and even Los Angeles- New York when I moved out west. But perhaps now that I’m no longer 19 years old, the concept of driving all night (“ROADTRIP!!!”) is no longer as exciting. I mean, what’s wrong with an airplane? I’ll tell you what’s wrong with an airplane: it would have cost us more than $700 total to jet to Chicago for the weekend for Jon’s friend’s wedding, thanks to airline mergers, fewer seats, higher prices, overbooking, summer vacation and the recession.

So we’re driving. (Also because the in-laws really want us to take things from the basement to our house.) The trip is slightly shorter than if we left from New York (12 hours), which is good, and cuts down the time winding through Pennsylvania significantly, which is also good, but we’ll still have to contend with the long stretch of Ohio, which is bad and boring. I’m contemplating making a few stops in Amish country, and maybe even in Cleveland after seeing the hilarious video about the city which was so funny, I’ve had to post it here.

However, I have learned quite a bit about driving long distances, which I’m happy to share here.

1. Check your oil, tire pressure, windshield wiper fluid, brakes, battery, etc. It helps to have your car in good shape before you head out.

2. Use RainX on your windshield. Especially in winter. The directions say to “squeeze a small amount on a cloth and wipe” but the actual directions should be “squeeze large amount all over windshield, then use a lot of paper towels to rub it until no more streaks show.”

3. If you’re packing a full trunk, make sure you can access your spare easily. My friend was stuck unloading her truck in the middle of an Arizona desert and putting her laundry, fax machine, bedding and pillows on the highway after a flat.

4. Keep a phone charger in your car.

5. Don’t play the see-how-far-your-car-can-drive after the gas light goes on. Fill up before it reaches the E.

6. Have kids in the car? Read this blog entry I wrote a couple weeks ago.

7. Keep Wet-Ones and napkins/ paper towels within reach. And a plastic bag to act as a trash collector.

8.  Switch drivers often. Drink coffee. Eat beef jerky and carrots. Sing songs together. Contemplate short-term and long-term life plans. Listen to weird religious talk radio in other states. It’s an educational and cultural way to learn about our country.

More importantly, we’re headed to KENYA and TANZANIA the weekend after, so stayed tuned for the more exciting updates on that (I assure you, they will be more interesting than the blog entry about the cheese we try in Dutch Pennsylvania).