The end, my friends

There's an old showbiz saying that you should always leave the audience wanting more. What I'm afraid this means for you, Broad R., is that however much you may be addicted to my dispatches from the road regarding the 2006 WC, it's time for me to bring this blog to an end.

This was, of course, always the plan. Back when I started writing this blog, I knew it would be a time-limited project, one that would end when my trip to Germany did. Yet large parts of me would love to keep writing it. Travelblogging is, as I discovered last summer, an enormously enjoyable pastime while on the road, as well as a functional one--it forces me to keep a record of the various happenings that take place abroad, while at the same time apprising friends old and new of my whereabouts. Replete with pics and comments this time around, it's a habit that I hope to keep up as I continue to travel around in my efforts to see as much of the globe as possible. But it's time to get back to life and work and since this blog was always about the US in the 2006 WC, its raison d'etre has ceased to be, and so must el blog.

But as for the me and the now, I am as usual torn about the imminent end of this journey. On the one hand, I'm ready to go home. If the World Cup is a feast of soccer, I'm really really full. Not "exploding stomach guy from Monty Python" full, but "if I have any more food I could almost yak" full. As in, I'm going to watch the rest of the games, then put US soccer--indeed, all soccer but the occasional DCU game--on the shelf for a while. And while it's been great to see Berlin again, I've been here enough in the past two years that there's nothing entirely new that I've absolutely got to see.

And yet there's always that distinctive melancholia that accompanies the end of any trip. I remember with such clarity the morning I left Chicago, and feeling abuzz with excitement (not even imagining the strange and great change of plans that would dramatically alter my travel plans the very next day). I'm ready to go, but it's been an fantastic experience, and part of me wishes it were that morning again in O'Hare, full of anticipation and possibility, imagining but not really knowing what the next few weeks would bring. And with that, B.R., I must return to the packing and bid y'all auf wiedersehen.