I follow a blog entitled Where’s My Backpack?, written by a person who is an inveterate traveler. In today’s post, the author has this to say about the promise of a new year:

The beginning of a new year fills me with a sense of boundless possibility; of places yet to be explored, people to encounter, experiences waiting to be uncovered.

Look up in the top right corner of this page. There you will see the words of Charles Kuralt, who also relished adventure and who inspired my incurable wanderlust: “I see the road ahead is turning. I wonder what’s around the bend?”

Right now, it is 8 degrees outside my window and is supposed to drop another 20 degrees by sunrise tomorrow. Today is the perfect day to think ahead to the adventures that 2014 will bring, the beaches we will discover, the friends we will make and the scenic vistas yet to be found.

Carolyn and I are now old hands at the home exchange. We have done a dozen of them and each one has introduced us to places and people we would not have encountered otherwise. Exchanging our home allows us to travel to more places and do more things because we do not have to spend money for lodgings while we are away.

In the past few months, folks in Barcelona, Provence, Holland, Tuscany and Paris have inquired about doing a home exchange with us. But they all want to exchange for a month or more in the summer. We jealously guard our summer activities here in New England. Thoughts of lying on a beach in Newport or sailing on Narragansett Bay are what keep us going when the weather is bitterly cold and snowy outside, as it is today. Since we are not retired, long term exchanges during the rest of the year are simply not possible. Yet….

The loosening of our ties to the workaday world is just a year or two away now. And so we have begun to contemplate what we want to do with our time once we no longer have to set the alarm at night. That’s when Barcelona, Provence, Holland, Tuscany and Paris will become real possibilities. Not to mention the 3 months in Australia and New Zealand we have planned. For this year, exchanges within 300 miles of home are in order, as long as they have a beach nearby. Cape May, Lake Champlain, Montreal and coastal Maine are all on our radar.

It is these possibilities that sustain us as we look forward to 2014. Where will you go this year?