Resolve.

Credit: AK Randhawa

Last week AOL asked me to write a piece on travel resolutions for their readers. While those five are definitely contenders for my own personal list of resolutions (with the possible exception of drinking plastic bags of tea—I prefer it by the bucket), my version features a few alternative aspirations for 2011.

1 Wreak revenge on younger sister for her decade of violin practise with new bagpipe-playing skills. Revenge is sweet. Or ear-gnawingly discordant. Whichever.

2 Learn how to speak Gaelic to Americans. But not to people in Utah. There’ll be no blethering to the Utahans out of petty pique for them refusing to teach me Gaelic. The Texans will now be the ones to witness my appalling mangling of my land’s native tongue; Gaelic lessons in Fort Worth, Texas coming up. Take that, Utah.

3 Brush up Scottish country dancing skills. It’s been a while since I made a complete fool of myself in Honolulu while elderly Hawaiians showed me how to advance, retire and dance reels of three. All I remember is Step 1: Down shot of tequila.

4 Finish reading Susan Orlean’s “My Kind of Place: Travel Stories From a Woman Who’s Been Everywhere.” How can a book that starts at a taxidermy championship in Illinois go wrong?  This book has so many gems, details and perfect descriptions in its first 100 pages that I resent life (and the fact that I was recently reunited with cable for the first time in a decade) for having got in the way of me getting to page 277. Ms Orlean was on CBC’s Book Club the same week as I was, yes, she is that famous. Here’s Susan’s live chat. Here’s my mostly irrelevant ramblings on Canada’s national broadcaster.

5 Finish writing “The Scottish Ambassador.” It’ll be done in July. Huzzah! And then I get to work on the next one, “The 49th Best Small Town in America”.