A man needs a dream.

The Pencil Museum is located in England, at Keswick, Cumbria, the site of historic graphite mines and the place where the first graphite pencils were manufactured. I enjoy pencils, and I like to think that I utilize them in a responsible and appropriate manner. But the distance between my home and the Pencil Museum is in excess of 4,000 miles, many of them over the justly famous Atlantic Ocean, creating a serious impediment to ambulation. So a casual visit is out of the question. It's something to be planned for, a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Like the Hajj, but much, much sillier.