That giddy feeling

Yesterday marks the first day I opened up my Rough Guide Southeast Asia guide and started reading in earnest.  Earlier in the week I received an email from a travel agent who is assisting me in my cause of acquiring flexible, inexpensive and poorly defined tickets for my ambiguous itinerary.  My Kiwi friend Ping, whom I in Barcelona in 2008, uses Leah for all his bookings and suggested that she'd be able to sort through the quagmire of my wants and nebulous travel dreams.

I want to go for a long time--should I get a one-way ticket or refundable round-trip? I want to have flexibility to jet around SE Asia for a number of months and then be able to get to New Zealand when the time comes--what's the best hub to use for inexpensive & spontaneous travel? This corner of the world is unfamiliar and foreign to me, I don't even know where to want to go--what do you recommend? I have friends scattered in SE Asia--can you put together an itinerary that includes them? I'd like to get to NZ but I don't know when so I don't want to be bound to a departure date--can you make a flexible booking? I may decide to visit Nashville before I leave--which departure city is better: Nashville or Portland?

Yes. I am a travel agent's worst nightmare... Or, as a friend pointed out, I'm their dream client because I'm open to it all and will follow the advice given.  

Needless to say, I have not heard back from Leah so I suspect that in her mind, I fall into the former category of "nightmare."

This all got me thinking that yes, it's time I start actually learning about this place that will, by default, be my new vagabond home.  And with that, I cracked my guidebook and let the giddiness bubble up :)