Ah, success!

Here's the deal:  

I've been to France a number of times.  In fact, I used to live there, in Paris.  

My little sister Caitie had never been to France... had never been, in fact, out of the country.  So it was determined that I would take her around France for a few weeks, which I did last summer. 

We had a classic good time.  As you can see:

The goal of the whole trip, from my end, at least, was to (have a classic good time, and) make Caitie catch the travel bug.  As you probably know, I've got it.  Bad.  So I'm a good one to pass this along to her.  It can be highly contageous.  

Well.  Fast-forward seven or so months, Caitie goes to college in Milwaukee, Shana moves to DC, dad gets a transplant, la de da de da, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and now it's January, and Caitie's on her way to Orlando with the dance team from her school.  And when they arrived at the airport, she texted me and said: 

"you've created a monster.  

we flew into orlando international and i thought, 

oh, international?  where can i go from here?" 

I couldn't be more proud.  :) 

(... maybe she'll decide to quit school and come with me on the Russia-Australia-and-lots-of-stuff-in-between trip I'm planning for the fall...)