There were two separate invitations to visit Thailand and Cambodia this year and unrealized plans to meet a friend in Texas, journey through the heart of Mexico and slip into Cuba before Fidel Castro dies.

But none of the trips I considered taking this year have inspired the interest of friends and family like the quick, one-week vacation coming up in Florida.

After a summer trip taking the kids back to see family on the Mainland, I'll set off alone to join a friend for the first leg of his five-week driving vacation that will take him from the southern tip of the Florida Keys to Nashville, Tenn.

For me, it'll be a one-week journey of just 116 miles from Key West to Miami, a car ride that should only take four hours. Instead, the two of us will spend a week wandering through the Keys with no schedule, no plans, no hotel reservations and no itinerary — just a general intention to end up north in Miami where we'll part ways.

It seems like the perfect, simple, cost-effective way to unplug from life on this side of the world. And for some reason, people keep asking me to promise to Twitter from the road and post photos, videos and messages of our travels on Facebook.

No one can quite explain why they want constant updates. I think it's the idea of a good old-fashioned men's road trip that triggers their imaginations.

Back in my 20s, with a mortgage, a wife, two young children, a yellow Labrador retriever and a comfortable life in the suburbs, my married buddies and I would go on "men's getaways," as we called them — supposed camping trips that involved packing up all the tents and flannel shirts we owned but too often ended with us checking into a ski resort or a casino.

Fast-forward a couple of decades and the only solo guy trip I can remember involved a week in Las Vegas last year that was actually part business and part family reunion.

So this fall, the trip to the Keys will be a time to reflect and think in the company of a like-minded buddy. It's an adventure that will have to be absorbed before it can be shared — not blasted in short bursts of information in real time.

A tweet that says "just saw one of Ernest Hemingway's seven-toed cats!" won't honor the experience. Especially in Key West, the land of Hemingway and Tennessee Williams — great American writers who lived in a simpler time but often captured complex stories about men and their struggles, some imagined, some real and many self-inflicted.

On any other vacation, I'd pack a laptop, iPod and maybe a GPS. This time, I plan to bring nothing more high-tech than a yellow legal pad to scribble down observations on life and what it means to be on the open road with an old buddy.

In Cuba, 90 miles to the south of Key West, Hemingway wrote in "The Old Man and The Sea," his final major work of fiction:

"The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert. Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated."

That kind of imagery and insight just does not translate to a tweet of 140 characters or less: "84 days without a fish. Where are the fish? ... Sunburned. REALLY sunburned."

So when it's all over, when the legal pad is full of reflection, rumination and insight, then it will be time to share.

Until then, the adventure belongs to me alone.