If this were a normal year most of you would be planning your vacation trips just about now--so perhaps this week (by way of consolation) you might like to know some of the things we have learned about your future travel plans.

Right now, of course, the only readers who are doing much foreign traveling are the millions of servicemen who read the 698,300 copies we print each week for our armed forces overseas. But come the peace, a tremendous lot of you now in civilian life are planning to go abroad and see the world for yourselves.

Fact is, you expect to travel twice as much as ever before--and that's a great deal, for the records show that TIME families have always traveled far, wide--and handsome.

The year before Pearl Harbor, for example, nine out of ten of you went off on trips averaging 19.7 days, traveled an average of 2,156 miles. So many of you went by plane that a poll of airline travel card holders shows TIME far and away their first choice magazine, and so many of you also traveled by ship that similar polls show TIME way out in front as the favorite magazine of cruise passengers. (Another 142,800 of you traveled by Pullman--and the next Thursday you happen to be on a Pullman yourself you might look around and see how many more of your fellow travelers are reading TIME than any other magazine.)

Every country on the map (no matter how remote) has been visited by at least one TIME subscriber. Before the war 99,000 of you had been to the islands of the Pacific; sometime after V-J Day 397,000 of you plan to go there. Eighty-six thousand of you have already flown or sailed to South Amer ica; some day after the war 354,000 of you hope to take off for the Spanish Main! More than 250,000 of you have been to Europe, some of you many times; now, sooner or later, some 482,000 of you expect to cross the Atlantic --and that is actually 84,000 more Americans than embarked for all foreign ports in 1938.

More specifically, 169,000 of you plan to go to Scandinavia--166,000 to Russia--237,000 to the Mediterranean. And when we sat down to figure out the total mileage of your travel hopes we ended up with all these zeros --0,000,000,000--preceded by a six. (That equals 133,490 round trips to the moon.)

Much as you want to cross the oceans, you plan to see the Americas first--not only the 48 states but Mexico, the Canadian Rockies, Alaska, Cuba, Quebec and Hawaii. Those are the most popular spots for the immediate postwar years--in that order.

Perhaps this urge to see the world is one big reason why you turned to TIME in the first place--for with such worldwide interests, no wonder you wanted to know even more about world events than you could learn from the 2.2 newspapers you read each average day.

And we like to think that TIME itself has nourished your curiosity about the countries beyond the horizon--by telling you interesting things about the far peoples and places you haven't gotten around to visiting yet.

Cordially,

P.S. These travel facts and figures come from your replies to a survey our Research Department conducted among a large cross-section of TIME subscribers (if your name begins with a "C" you probably received one of the questionnaires).

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