Hit me! 3000 times!

London Eye at night from our bedroom window

Swiss Cottage hit another milestone today. The blog clocked up its 3000th hit. Amazing! The first 1000 hits took seven months, the second thousand only four months and the last thousands barely three months. Who are these people? At the current rate the site will receive close to 6000 visitors in 2007.

The original purpose of this blog was to capture the adventure we're having in Europe, while describing what it's like to live in Europe. I worry that as time passes I'll lose my foreign observer's eye. It's only natural that daily differences will eventually become the norm. I'd hate for this to become just a blog about life as usual. The world's got to be more interesting than that.

I've decided to expand the scope of the blog in future to include memories from past travel adventures. I've been traveling internationally since leaving home at the age of 17. At the time I was an exchange student in Syracuse, a city in Upstate New York. My teenage adventure kicked off a history of wanderlust that continues to this day. Come August we'll visit Mexico and I'll clock up my 50th country. It's time to capture some of these travel memories and liberate thousands of photos stored in shoe boxes around the house.

Look for stories about my trip to Easter Island, climbing the Rock of Gibraltar, sliding down the Great Wall of China, stalking leopards in Africa and cruising the islands of Tahiti. I've been lucky to have seen so much of the world in the last 25 years. It helps that my job enables me to revisit much of it every year. Hopefully these new posts will inspire a few mystery web friends to explore more of the world as well.