OK, I just had my first real pang of "OH NO, I'm going to miss that!" because I thought of Amazing Race. Oh, crap, oh darn.  For fans of Amazing Race I don't have to explain its attraction, but for those of you who have never watched, oh, my, I do love that show.  I love to travel and I can travel the world just by watching this show.  It has taken me to India several times and I feel like I'm right there in a crowded market, or driving on the streets crowded by cars and motorcycles, or riding on the one of the crowded trains watching the countryside go by. 

I've been zip-lining in Costa Rica, bungee-jumping at Victoria Falls, and tried to put together a bookshelf at the Ikea headquarters in Sweden.  I've entered a temple devoted to cockroaches in India, chased sheep in New Zealand, climbed mountains in Romania, and visited a building where Africans where kept before being loaded onto slave ships.

There is the typical reality-show-drama stuff that can be fun and/or annoying, but the locations are what make the show so much fun for me.  Hong Kong, Viet Nam, China, Japan, Mongolia...the scenery and the people are fascinating.  The tasks are often to do manual labor jobs that are done in those countries, so teams have had to harvest salt from the sea (Africa - I forget which country), and take food orders in Mandarin and repeat them to the Chinese chef. The teams have had to ride and/or drive all kinds of vehicles or carry large loads on bicycles.  They've had to hitch all kinds of animals up (from horses to donkeys to llamas to camels) and then drive them to a destination (I will never forget the teams trying to pull donkeys along and the donkeys sitting down on the road.  I think that was Ireland!).

This year I will miss it.  And I'm a little sad about that.