Enter the Year of the Dragon

on looking back to where I started, and ahead to where I'm going

I love the clean slate feeling of a New Year. Everything feels as fresh as the brisk January air, with its snap of frost that makes the inside of your nose tingle. Of course, a year is not a precise container; all of my injuries, work stresses, and personal gripes will roll into the new year with me, like the subscription of Entertainment Weekly that kept showing up in our mailbox months after we’d stopped paying for it. And yet! I welcome the restart. There’s a new calendar up on the wall (my annual gift for being a Sierra Club donor). I have a new planner on my desk, its page deliciously blank and welcoming, its cover depicting the Year of the Dragon. 

Here be dragons!

The new year feels like a fitting time for me to reflect back on how I got into writing about travel, my “origin story” in pop culture parlance. I’ve been writing stories for as long as I can remember. I began by scribbling illustrated stories in crayon about dogs and horses (typically featuring a French poodle, as I th…