Vacation dreamin'

I'll be here next week. This is Glacier National Park. Look how beautiful it is - I'm *so* excited.

My enthusiasm is multi-fold: 1) I'm going to be away from work for an entire week, 2) I'll be with three wonderful women and I can't wait to explore the park with them, and 3) look how beautiful it is!!!

What I think is even more exciting is that this trip is a social networking success story. Let's go back to late summer 2008. Under intense pressure from high school friends, I caved to multiple "friend requests" and created an account with Facebook. To say that I did it reluctantly would be massively underestating my interest in joining FB. After creating the account, during which I entered the bare minimum of details, I let my sparse account languish - unloved, unlooked at, uncared for. And then...

Oh, then I became addicted. I would spend hours on my computer, after work, looking up everything: photos, links, friend lists, status updates, tending my (Lil) Green Patch and my friends' patches, etc. I totally and completely went off the deep end. It was very, very sad. After a couple of weeks of FB-induced madness, I went cold turkey.

After some time away from the "candy", I went back to FB but limited my use to something W-A-Y more reasonable.

But something good happened during the dark days of my addiction. A college friend that I had pretty much lost touch with posted some vacation pictures and those pictures included some very beautiful snapshots of Glacier. After viewing the pictures, I promised myself, a la, Liz Lemon, "I want to go to there!"

I have to imagine the pure purpose of social networking was fulfilled in the instance. FB created a connection to a long lost friend who posted pictures and the pictures created a spark of interest intense enough to drag four women, three from Chicago and one from San Francisco, across the country to converge on a remote corner of Montana, during a recession, to witness, in person, the natural beauty promised by the pictures.

I can't wait to tell you about it when I get back.