Friday, 03 October 2003

I could tell you where I'm going, but: Last March I took a six-week leave of absence from work, to cure a severe case of burnout and to explore the Australian Outback. By pure coincidence my leave began the day Bush gave Saddam a 48-hour ultimatum to leave Iraq, and it ended a few days before Bush declared that major combat operations had ended.

Needless to say my co-workers had fun speculating about where I'd really been for those six weeks, in spite of my photos of Alice Springs, Ayers Rock, and other touristy places. It was the running joke for a week or two after I got back to the office that I'd really been crawling through the Iraqi desert in Rambo-style face paint, calling in missile strikes on Saddam, and so forth; my "vacation" was just a cover story.

The reason I mention this is that I'm taking another six-week leave of absence, starting today. (Australian labor law is wonderful. If you work for one company for ten years, you get a two-month paid sabbatical—and I transferred in with ten years' experience.) This time I'm off to Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Germany, Sweden and other exotic ports of call; unlike the last time, though, I'll probably be out of blogging range for the entire six weeks.

It only stands to reason that I'd be taking a six-week hiatus just days after a swarm of new readers have discovered the blog (I haven't had this much traffic since February, when Glenn Reynolds and Andrew Sullivan both linked at once), but there you are. I've refreshed my blogroll with a few new links for your reading pleasure, and I might post an entry or two from Internet cafes along the route (I wouldn't count on this, though), but otherwise look for me to resurface, with lots of photos and travel stories, sometime around mid-November.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 1:31 am. comments.