Picture if you will, an impressionable, brown-eyed, curly-haired girl around the age of three. She's being pushed in a stroller in Frontier Town in the Lake George area. Surrounded by people dressed in western garb, her parents roll her along past the wooden store fronts. When all of a sudden....boom! There is a gunfight between rooftop desperadoes and a showdown in the main dirt-covered street.

That, is my first memory. And I guess you could say it is travel-related since this was one of my first trips.

The trip to Frontier Town would be followed by countless annual treks to the Great Escape, Magic Forest, and, my favorite, the Catskill Gamefarm, which has since closed unfortunately.

Eventually, my tastes started to outgrow the theme parks. I think from an early age my parents knew I had an interest in travel and learning about the world. They assuredly knew before I did, anyway.

I recently started thinking about when I first became interested in it and I gave myself one of those cliche answers: "I've always been interested in it." Well, I finally pinpointed always to in elementary school when my favorite book was Where's Waldo and my favorite show was Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego. I loved this idea of going from one destination to another which Waldo did consistently and you had to find him each time. The premise was similar for Carmen Sandiego only she was the stereotypical bad guy. But she was a bad guy with taste. She surrounded herself with amazing objects of beauty and historical significance - the Louvre, Stonehenge, the Eiffel Tower, the Nile River.

I guess, looking back, I wanted to be surrounded by these things too. But instead of somehow stealing or sucking them up in some cartoon-fashion, I've just collected postcards along the way instead.

I've realized through my travels that you don't have to go across the world to another continent, another hemisphere, another timezone to find history, fun, and adventure - which, to me, are the main reasons I travel. Through my annual summer trips with my parents, to theme parks and Lake Placid, I came to love my own backyard. (You don't have to be a huge hockey fan to enjoy the significance of Lake Placid as the home of the Miracle on Ice or an engineer to appreciate RPI as the first English-speaking engineering school in this hemisphere).

I've climbed completely alone through the Great Pyramid of Giza, dropped my camera at the Pantheon in Paris, craved a hot chocolate on a ship in the fjords of Norway, had a run in with a burglar on an overnight train in Hungary (my parents are still annoyed about that one), but somehow I always find my way home.

In this blog, I plan to write about my past, present and future traveling experiences. I'm going on a camping trip at Shelving Rock, a rustic state-run campground near Lake George, this weekend and I'm currently planning my cross-country trip which will start on July 1.

I'm sure this will be quite the ride.