I will never not be tired. That was a realization I had, or at least a passing thought that feels true while dealing with jet lag. Then I had an interesting conversation with one of our favorite baristas.
He related that he had been talking to my husband earlier about what their generation’s version of smoking is. Cigarettes had been on our mind, since very few Californians smoke tobacco and they are rather more common in Britain. It didn’t surprise me that the topic had come up. (It’s also fairly common for us to have these sorts of extended relay conversations by means of the tea counter). The topic of warfare in antiquity had come up in my Classics program. We were wondering what it must be like to run into battle with nothing but sandals, shield, and spear, knowing you might die any minute. Did we have anything that scary in modern life? The answer everyone came up with was driving on the freeway. Almost every day we might see cars piled up, and everyone knows someone who was killed in a traffic collision, but we shrug and keep doing it. I didn’t have a license yet and this conversation put me in no great hurry to learn to drive; indeed I quit and I don’t think I’ve been behind the wheel in at least two years. What this is saying is that our social norms can change, they can and they do. Sometimes they change quite suddenly and other times it creeps up on us slowly, almost unnoticeably. What they decided is that our generation’s version of smoking is: not sleeping. “Our generation” in this case meant Millennials. My hubby and I are both Generation X, from opposite ends of the age bracket. Our tattooed, pierced, beanie-wearing bearded barista made this observation, and it instantly snapped something into place for me. It didn’t use to be this way. I honestly don’t remember everyone going around talking about how tired they are all the time back in the Eighties or Nineties. When did it start? When did it change? It used to be “how are you?” “Fine, how are you?” Then it was “how are you?” “Busy!” Then “Crazy busy!” Now it’s perpetually “tired.” So tired. I shared that people weren’t talking about how tired they were all the time, now that he mentioned it. An observation like this from a young man who wakes up at 3:00 AM to serve coffee all day might be somewhat suspect, but then consider that our neighborhood asks this of him. Nobody is asking bookstore clerks to wake up at 3 AM to sell books, am I right? I said I thought it probably changed with the advent of the internet. It was cable TV that had everyone gradually quit hanging out in each other’s living rooms, I’m pretty sure of that. In the Seventies and Eighties it was pretty common, even if we were just talking or playing cards. Even our less-favorite neighbors would still drop by and vice versa, maybe just to watch Knight Rider. Back in those days, you had to watch stuff at a specific time. Videos were expensive to rent, let alone buy, and getting a movie and pizza was a big enough deal for people to put their shoes on and actually leave their apartment. Then we all got cable. It was a few years after that before the “Information Superhighway” and the “World Wide Web” started to take off. Years after that before we all got smartphones. I remember all of this point by point, when I look back, because I grew up with a rotary phone and a little black and white television with an antenna on top. I remember that when we met, my ex-husband had a pager. I remember how incredibly excited I was to have a new flip phone with a clock on it. It crept up on us. When I went to get my tea today, I was feeling really sorry for myself about how tired I have been and how hard it’s been to get a decent night’s sleep. Then I had this conversation with a Millennial who says his wife only sleeps five hours a night, and he needs “at least six.” Seriously??? I feel like a total wreck on six hours. I’m a nine-hour person. Our barista’s wife is routinely sleeping a little over half what I consider the “correct” amount. It was spontaneously mentioned that this poor sleepless gal spends an hour in bed on her phone before going to sleep. “In my day,” she creaked querulously, “‘on the phone’ meant talking to someone.” Now we’re scrolling, scrolling, endlessly scrolling. Looking at what? As far as our quantity and quality of sleep is concerned, it doesn’t matter. It is probably true that lack of sleep is the new smoking. It’s also pretty indisputable that if we’re lying there in the dark, scrolling on our phones, then the phones have something to do with it. It is certainly true that if everyone is doing it, it feels “normal” even when it also feels terrible. It feels terrible and it might be killing us, in a way we won’t realize for decades. Almost everyone smoked back in the Seventies and Eighties. Everyone had at least one ashtray, sometimes several. You could buy cigarettes from vending machines in restaurants and at gas stations. It was rare to go to someone’s house or ride in their car without at least one person smoking a cigarette the whole time. Then it hit the media that there were people out there smoking out of a hole in their throat. It started to be less and less common, until now smoking means you do it next to a dumpster in the rain. Eventually, just like with smoking, it will start to be more obvious how devastating a health impact comes from never getting enough sleep. Constant sleep deprivation will stop making any kind of sense. It will gradually start to become unfashionable to be tired all the time, when it’s so obvious that something can be done about it. Back in the day, there was room for boredom, for staring at the ceiling, for hanging out and doing nothing, and maybe that’s why we slept more. Maybe we won’t go back to that, but surely there’s something more interesting than being Tired, So Tired every day. Maybe it will only happen when we replace it with something like spacesuit chafing or the health effects of faster-than-light travel. Trip planning is nuts. Every single detail is important. Anything you forget to pack has the potential to mess up your trip, and I know, because someone in my traveling party has forgotten everything including: passport, wallet, car keys, glasses, prescription meds, and hiking boots. There’s even been more than one ticket booked to an airport in the wrong city. Rigor in travel planning is rarely wasted.
The first law of trip planning is: NO CHECKED BAGS. [The only exception to this is a wilderness trip, because our expedition packs are too big to fit in the cabin, they weigh too much, and we sometimes want to pack liquids]. Personally, I expect the entire sum total of my luggage to fit under the seat in front of me, and usually that’s where I put it. Why hand luggage? Because you always know where it is, and because you can make connections after a flight delay when others can’t. It also gives you far more options for layover adventures when you don’t have a big wheelie bag - they aren’t even allowed in all places, and you don’t want to find that out the hard way. NO CHECKED BAGS - NOT JUST A PHILOSOPHY, BUT A RELIGION. The second law of trip planning: THREE DAYS PER CITY. We break this rule all the time in small ways, but it is the true foundation of a trip. Three days is enough time to thoroughly explore most cities - too long in my home city, unless you love napping on the beach! Any city that requires more than three days to explore, like London or New York, probably deserves multiple trips. It might also be a good candidate for a hub city. As an example, we love O’Hare Airport so we route international trips through there whenever we can. The third law of trip planning: ONE HIGHLIGHT EACH. A “highlight” is the “swear I’ll never ask for anything else as long as I live” part of someone’s trip. Everyone gets one. The rest of the group better be either ride or die, or they’re going off alone for their own highlight at the same time. Examples: I rode the London Eye with my husband because it was his highlight, even though I freaking hate Ferris wheels. I owe him for all the times he’s bushwhacked with me in search of, say, the tricolored blackbird, and don’t even ask him about Mandarin ducks. [Note: I don’t think Mandarin ducks are real. I think they are the Sasquatch of the birding world, added to birdwatching guides as a prank]. Ideally, everyone gets a highlight each day of the trip. Usually they are something small like “buy a bag of Starburst” or “walk across this famous bridge.” In museums, it’s good for each person to pick a room, because the biggest and best museums can’t be covered adequately in a single day anyway. These are the three laws. They may be amended only after discussion and official approval. My husband and I also have a policy that we take turns choosing the destination of our trip. We’ve agreed that we would both like to visit every country on Earth, so it’s somewhat arbitrary in which order we see them. This is when the true trip planning starts. The very first thing that we do is to check the weather history during the time of our trip. This tends to rule out a lot of ideas. Our wedding anniversary is in late August, which just happens to be a terrible time to travel in large sections of the world. It’s our personal choice to avoid the rainy season, partly because inclement weather means more clothes and bulkier bags. Next we look at the country’s “national day” and any other major festivals. Usually we are trying to avoid these. They make everything cost 3x as much and almost universally result in large drunken mobs. It can be really fun to see a country decorated for celebration, though. My next pass - and this falls to me, because I’m the one with the dietary constraints - is to look up as many suitable restaurants as possible. I search for “vegan restaurant” [city] and cross-reference with Happy Cow. Then I mark them all as a favorite on Apple Maps. This is huge because we often wind up in parts of town that we had never anticipated, and we can often find a place to eat nearby without standing on the sidewalk searching for half an hour. Many parts of the world have better options and labeling for gluten-free, vegan, or other preferences or sensitivities than we do in the US. Others do not. It can ruin a trip to discover that the only places with real options for a meal are already closed for the day. Another vital part of trip planning is to look up “[city] in 24 hours” and “must-see [city]” and “don’t miss [city].” Most of those attractions usually don’t interest either of us at all. A few of them will turn out to be the major highlights of the trip. Sometimes we hadn’t even realized that that attraction existed, and it changes our goals for the trip entirely. I mark all of these in Apple Maps as well. Once our key attractions and a bunch of restaurants are marked, we zoom in on the map together and browse around. This helps us to get acquainted with the layout of the city in advance. It tends to be pretty obvious that certain places are grouped near each other, and we can spend a day in each area. Other attractions are so far afield that we cross them off our list, not wanting to spend half a day or more on a tour bus unless it’s truly epic. London wound up happening in pie wedges, with Waterloo as the center of the pie. Iceland happened in loops, starting and ending in Reykjavik. Spending a few weeks planning a trip adds to the anticipation and extends the fun. It also helps to avoid pitfalls such as showing up on the day that a destination is closed, or arriving so late that we can’t buy a ticket. Policy is part of trip planning for us. We have a weekly status meeting, where we’ve worked out policies for all aspects of our marriage, and our travel policies have become a friendly, efficient way of having fun together without annoying each other. (Much). The better we get at planning, the more fun we have, and the more we can anticipate our next trip. I won’t claim that we went to Europe “for free” because nothing in this world is free. We like to say it’s “included.” For all intents and purposes, though, we got our flights and lodging without paying, and that’s kinda free, but we’ll stick to points for accuracy’s sake.
Los Angeles to Heathrow, United miles. Edinburgh to O’Hare and back to LAX, United miles. Waterloo Hampton Inn, Hilton points. Edinburgh Airport Hampton Inn, Hilton points. There are parts of our trip that we possibly could have paid for with other types of points that we have saved up, but we’re still learning how this stuff works. Sometimes the exchange rate isn’t a good enough value and sometimes we’re a couple hundred points short. The main thing to note is that I’m not a big fan of providing free advertisements to major corporations that don’t need it. As an historian I’ll just note that in the attempt to attract loyal customers, various branded megaliths will offer increasingly enticing deals in exchange for that loyalty - and the data, of course. If you’re cynical enough to believe that your data are already floating around out there, and we know ours has been hacked at least three separate and distinct times, then you may as well eke some slight gratification out of it. Rewinding a bit, what did I mean when I said that things aren’t “free” but are rather “included”? Let’s say someone offers me a paper plate with a slice of pie. Technically it’s “free” but is it? I’m on the hook for being at the event with the free pie, whatever it is, which means I’ve probably either paid to get in, I’m volunteering with cleanup, or at the very least I paid to get there and traded my time for this over any other options. Also, I’ll have to deal with the caloric intake of the slice of pie itself and, in my case, checking the clock because I can’t eat within three hours of bedtime. Everything is a tradeoff. In this case, the reward points that my husband and I used for our trip could have come from two sources: his business travel and our credit card usage. The tradeoff for the frequent business travel is that we often can’t be together. He traveled something like 21 out of the last 50 weeks, sometimes for a week at a time. We haven’t been married so long that we quit liking each other or anything. The tradeoff for the points cards is that they have an annual fee. They require a certain credit profile, which not everyone can manage, and they require artful juggling to make sure that we don’t carry a balance. In other words, this trip is not only something that not everyone could do, it’s something that not everyone would even want to do. Another way that we did not travel for “free” is that we paid for a bunch of stuff that is not available through points, not that we know of anyway. We ate meals, some in restaurants and some from grocery stores. We paid admission to museums and historical sites. We rode all sorts of public transit, from the tram to the water bus. We even paid cash to use the restroom. It’s a bad idea to imagine that you can travel for “free.” It can be either a form of abundance mindset or of scarcity, and as we all know scarcity mindset spreads like mold. It seems that most people who want to travel on a tight budget will get so fixated on their bargains and extracting value that it prevents them from having a good time. It’s also rough on the communities. Let me throw in there that I’ve had occasion to live in a resort area more than once. It’s not my preference. Why? Right now we live on a pier. What people basically do is come to our neighborhood on the weekend to get drunk and leave a bunch of trash and broken bottles, then drag their crying kids around or get into domestic arguments, sometimes within earshot of our living room. Every single one of them is hellbent on sneaking into our parking lot because they don’t believe they should have to pay one red cent toward our personal apartment complex or municipal expenses. Such as trash pickup, parking lots, road maintenance, or policing their drunken butts. I don’t want to be that kind of tourist, the one who brings a cooler from home and feels like local people are trying to rob them. I’d rather be mildly interesting, a middle-aged lady with a big backpack going somewhere cool. Want to come along? The way that we look at our points accrual is that it’s a sort of weird coupon for certain specific consumer habits. My hubby is rewarded for putting in mega-long hours at work and being the designated fix-it guy, the closer. We are both rewarded for committing financial transactions. We use these bizarre consumer bonuses to offset our spending in other areas, such as: Eating at local restaurants Shopping at the co-op grocery store Riding public transit Buying a book or travel gear from an independent bookstore Contributing toward wilderness preservation, because birds Supporting museums and historic sites, because if we don’t, who will? We’d like to feel that we are contributing in some small way to the places that we go. We’ve seen a lot of preposterously bad behavior from fellow tourists during our travels. Sometimes it’s so embarrassing that we still talk about it years later, like the guy who demanded a guarantee that he would see a blue whale or his money back. Um, sir? They live in the sea, wild and free? They do not answer to thee or to me? Whales they be? One fine day in Iceland, we were waiting for a tour bus when I saw a young woman drop her glove. I tried calling after her but it was pretty windy. She was walking so fast and that glove was obviously hand-knit, a beautiful fuchsia, days of effort. I ran after her and handed it over. I was rewarded by her thanks and the slight smiles and nods of the bystanders who saw. The GDP technically decreased that day because I destroyed the reason for someone to buy something new. In reality I know that I contributed to the community, not just of “people in the national park that day” but the international community, built on goodwill and mutual trust. In other words, the foundational concepts of an economy. Secret confession time: I’ve been cheating. Blatantly. Right there in plain view, too big to miss. I have a bunch of review books to read, and instead I’ve been reading Neal Stephenson’s new book Fall. In hardcover. Over 800 pages of it.
It’s summer, and it’s hot, and I’ve been traveling and I had oral surgery, and, well, no book review. Instead I’m just going to talk about how we choose what to read, and why, and when. Books have always lit me up more than anything else. When I am invited to someone’s home, I’m going to read every title on their bookshelf to see what we have in common. If I see someone reading or carrying a book, whether on public transportation or at a cafe, I’m going to try to get a look at the cover to see what it is, even if I have to turn my head sideways. Often it’s something I’ve already read, because when a book is very popular I have to find out why, even if it’ll terrible, with the exception of Fifty Shades of Grey which I couldn’t manage even on principle. Not sorry. Like most readers, I have a list of books I plan to read one day. I also have a working stack of books I “am reading,” which means I started them and intend to finish, and another pile of books in the house that I haven’t started yet. In my mind, this is enough reading for a few days. In reality, experience shows that it will take me longer than that. How much longer? This is an actual calculation that can be performed, just like the timeline of knitting up yarn or eating up cans of soup can be calculated. Since it’s summer, we don’t have to, we can just do a freshness test like we would with some nice fruit. Let’s say we can read a book a day. Most people are not reading that much, that fast, which is fine of course, though we can compare our reading habits to our propensity to binge-watch several television episodes and rate that against our reading quota. (If we wish we had more time to read, the time may be there, that’s all. Everything is a tradeoff). If I read a book a day, then I have enough books to keep me busy for over two weeks. Wait, no, four weeks. I forgot to count audio. In my imagination, that’s the fresh stuff. It’s the lettuce in my produce bin. In reality, sometimes that fresh lettuce is more like the limp white celery that’s been there since who knows how long. On top of my active reading list, I have books on hold at the library. Well, libraries plural. That adds up to... Fifty-three. Almost seven weeks, that is if I actually read a book a day. Seven weeks plus the four I already have. The good thing about having plenty of books piled up and in the pipeline is that I always have something to read. I can’t think of the last time I was stuck in a boring situation without a book at hand. I read more than most people because it’s something I love to do, I make time for it, I would miss it if I didn’t do it, and I wish I had more time for it than I do. On the other hand, it seems that Past Me has been dictating a lot of my reading choices. I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be “done” with a book and wander around looking for something new to read. I think I may have been in that place during summer vacation between the ages of nine and twelve. We lived two blocks from the city library, which was housed in an old grocery store where I used to get a free cookie. I even had a “cookie card” with my name on it. The association between fresh hot sugar cookies and BOOKS is probably just a Me thing, but it’s there. I started with the Nancy Drew books. Then I would go in and read the jacket copy on every book in the young adult rack. Once I’d read my way through the children’s section, I realized that nothing was stopping me from crossing the building and looking at adult books. That’s when I discovered Ray Bradbury. I used to come home with as many books as I could fit in my bag. I realized I could read a book a day, then two. My record was four, the month I was reading Lois Lowry. That was discovery mode, walking in desperate for a book and walking out excited over my score. Then I had the idea that I would be able to read “every book in the library” and I started at A. That was the beginning of feeling like I had a mission, the beginning of the feeling that I was not completely caught up. I’m afraid I became a completist. Most readers believe in being surrounded by hundreds of books at home, even if they haven't read most of them. These books are aspirational even if they are not elitist choices. Much ink has been spilled in outrage over the concept of getting rid of books, any books, for any reason. Sure, fine, whatever. If having shelves full of books you haven't read genuinely gives you more passion and inspiration for reading the books you do choose, then great. Me, I’m starting to wonder if maybe I should dial back. Start over. Dump my list. Venture forth with “nothing to read” at all. What if I didn’t let Past Me choose the next seventy books I plan to read? Or does having that list add some kind of illicit thrill to playing hooky and reading something just because I can’t wait, because I need to drop everything and read it right now? That’s my suggestion. At least in your mind, if you love to read, or used to, play a little visioning exercise. In your imagination, picture that you don’t have a dusty stack of partial or unread books next to your bed. Imagine that you never made a mental or emotional commitment to read these books before you’re allowed to move on and read something else. Play book hooky and see how you feel about picking something fresh and new. I never thought I could “afford” to travel. Then I thought I was “too old.” In my mind, only people in their early twenties got to go anywhere. This is completely weird, because I started flying alone at the age of seven and in some ways I grew up at the airport. Scarcity mindset is powerful.
CAN’T AFFORD end of story! The biggest problem with scarcity mindset is that we are so locked down, we don’t even bother to find out exactly how much something costs. I went through this earlier this year. I had been wanting a new desktop computer, and I sat on my wallet forever and ever, a couple years past the point when my old laptop was even usable anymore. Finally I felt like I had “enough” saved up. I went down in trepidation, very nervous about spending “that kind of money.” (Same kind of flat green American dollars I spend on anything else?) It turned out to cost less than half of what I had estimated, even after accessories and tax. !!! Travel can very much be that way. If you save $25 a week for a year, you can basically buy a round-trip airline ticket to anywhere in the world. (Not, like, Antarctica or Area 51 or inside Fort Knox, but you know what I mean). Sometimes it doesn’t make sense to travel right at this very minute, for various reasons. For instance, if a friend is coming to town and we haven’t seen him in several years, we’d probably rather stay home and visit with him than go somewhere else. Maybe someone is finishing school, or it’s monsoon season, or we’re waiting for the cherry blossoms. There are all sorts of reasons why it might be better to wait a bit before going on that dream trip. In the meantime, you can start planning and preparing, for real, right this minute, as soon as you finish reading this. There are two things that it is very smart to do if you want to travel, and they don’t cost anything. The first is learning to ride various kinds of public transit. You don’t actually have to pay to get on the bus or the tram or the water taxi or the funicular or whatever to do this, if you’re geographically isolated or you believe you are too broke for bus fare. You can look at maps and timetables and watch instructional videos. There are zero good reasons to skip this part, if you’re serious about your trip. It’s part of fine-tuning your vision and clarifying what you want. The second thing that is very smart to do is to walk a lot, especially uphill and especially up long flights of stairs. Not everyone can walk, true. If there are mobility issues then it’s even more valuable to practice ahead of time. Just how are you going to get around? One of the saddest things I ever saw was a woman struggling to keep up with her friends at a historic site in Spain. We were coming down the (uneven, primitive) stone steps after looking at some incredible cave paintings. The woman was recovering from knee surgery. Her party wanted to know how many more steps there were and what the terrain was like. The sad but true answer was that there was no way she would enjoy the tour, and maybe a 5% chance she could actually do it, given the nature of the site. She was going to wind up sitting outside in the rain and cold for an hour, all because nobody thought to do the research. A quarter mile of slippery stone steps up a steep hill! What were they thinking, putting her in that position? Maybe they could have waited a year, and done a different trip during her recovery? It’s not about limitations, it’s about making life as interesting as possible within the constraints that we have at this moment. There is a third thing that we can do to prepare for a dream trip, and that is to study the local language. It is SO helpful, especially when reading signs. On that same trip to see the cave paintings, we would have missed out except that we were willing to go along with a Spanish-language tour. We probably got 50-80% of the information, enough to feel like we understood what we were looking at. The thing about travel is that it is extremely specific, moment to moment. That’s what makes it interesting. You’re standing on one specific square foot of the world at one specific moment in time. At that moment, either the restaurant or attraction that you wanted to visit is open for business, or it is not. Either you have the correct currency or form of payment, or you do not. Either you have read the map correctly, or you have not. Does this make sense? You’re not “in England,” you’re in the Underground station in a hot and stuffy hallway, trying to figure out which of two tunnels to enter. You’re not “in Iceland,” you’re standing in front of a gravel parking lot, realizing that the museum you wanted to visit is not only closed but completely demolished. Travel means RESEARCH and lots of it, every day, every time you transition between one activity or location and another. Part of what makes travel cool is that it magically transmogrifies you into “a traveler.” What does that is the process of figuring out how things work. That develops a mindset that is distinctly flexible and robust. You learn how to deal with confusion and disappointment and unexpected problems, such as getting stopped in security because one of your plane tickets matches your maiden name and the other matches your new married name. You learn perspective about what kinds of problems are worth getting upset about and which are just part of the game. Eventually you learn to anticipate most situations ahead of time and just avoid those types of problems entirely. Like the overpacking problem and the “late to the airport” problem and the “quarrel over which restaurants to go to” problem. Travel is just you in a different place for a while. That means you can solve for many of your travel problems in advance, while you are still the at-home you. Then when it’s time to leave, your trip will be a dream come true. The numbers are in and we are maniacs. My husband and I walked over 83 miles and climbed the equivalent of 167 flights of stairs on vacation. In 11 days. What does this mean?
What it means is that we’ve figured out our idea of fun, and it includes a lot of walking. If we want to see the world for a week or two at a time, then we have to stay in the game the rest of the year. There are two types of trips that we tend to go on. One is the urban type, like staying on the Las Vegas Strip or walking from Waterloo to Kensington Palace. The other is the wilderness expedition. It doesn’t seem at all obvious, but both kinds of travel add up to a lot of miles on foot, a surprising amount of elevation gain, and often, a backpack weighing anywhere from ten to fifty pounds. There isn’t much that is interesting to see, in our opinion, from the inside of a car, the inside of a hotel room, or a lounge chair. Traveling revolves around value. Frankly it can be very annoying and expensive to go anywhere, and every time I go through airport security I swear off it, “and this time I mean it.” That’s why it’s important to make sure that you’re doing as much of your favorite stuff as possible, and spending as little time and money on anything else as you can manage. For us, we don’t see the point of doing certain things on a trip. Those include, but are not limited to: Watching TV Watching movies that we can see at home Going to a shopping mall Looking at souvenirs, none of which are locally made Eating at American chain restaurants Carrying around more than maybe 16 ounces of extra luggage Trying on and rejecting various outfits We also aren’t really fans of dance clubs and we don’t drink. What we really like to do is to SEE EVERYTHING. Parks, museums, architecture tours, public art, archaeological sites, all cover a lot of ground. Many of them are impossible to see without going up and down a lot of stairs. Our second-biggest day of stair-climbing was done in just six hours in Edinburgh. We weren’t like this when we first got together. We both drank a lot of cola and we hadn’t yet been camping together. That was also before we lost 100 pounds between us. Walking everywhere used to be really hard on my hubby because he had a childhood foot injury that caused nerve damage. After about two miles of walking he would be done. He’d be walking with a limp and really struggling. I had an easier time walking, but I still had chronic pain issues and my fitness level (and pain threshold) was very low. We would just be too tired. I never would have thought, after being together for thirteen years and aging a wee little bit, that we would be covering so much more ground now than we could when we were both still in our thirties. Walking a lot toughens your feet. That part is obvious. What isn’t so obvious is that getting fitter can reverse what felt like permanent and total damage in other parts of the body. My dislocated hip and dislocated rib, fixed. His herniated disks, no longer a problem. Knee pain, back pain, shoulder pain, fibromyalgia, geez we really are middle-aged... All the problems we used to be able to list off are fading into history. All of this has been encouraging to us, partly because of course it’s better not to be in cruising pain from the moment you start the day. It’s also encouraging because the more we travel and the more active we are, the more ability we seem to be buying ourselves. I won’t lie, there were a couple of points during the trip when my feet were so sore that I wanted to ask for a piggyback ride. Daddy carry me. My boots weren’t really designed for twelve miles on concrete. It got easier day by day, though, and the other thing that happened was that the waistband on my pants loosened up. The human body was designed for walking. When we say “hunter-gatherer” what we’re really saying is “walks all day every day.” I think of my pioneer ancestors walking thirty miles a day next to their covered wagons, some of them probably barefoot and certainly not wearing modern athletic shoes. Before 1950 or thereabouts, most people both urban and rural probably put in ten-mile days routinely and never thought twice about it. We meet a lot of people on the road, and some of them are considerably older than we are. I think we both saw someone who caught our attention on this trip. Mine was an American woman of about sixty, who was in much better shape than I am and looked like she could easily do a handspring into the pool. I couldn’t take my eyes off her shoulders. I knew I wanted to be as fit as she is when I reach her age. My husband’s was a Scottish grandfather playing soccer on the village green. His calves were indistinguishable from a young man’s even though he had to be over seventy. He was executing footwork that his grade-schooler grandkids couldn’t do, probably because he had been kicking a football every day for, oh, at least sixty-five years. Will we do the same? We’d like to visit every country in the world, and at the rate we’re going, we would have to start doing about twenty a year if we want to catch up. We’ve talked about how sad it would be if we finally had the money and leisure but lacked the strength or the energy. We still have time today to keep walking and keep climbing stairs, huffing side by side as we plan our next trip. I was just thinking how long it had been since I participated in the 24-Hour Readathon, when I had a surprise occasion to be up for 24 hours. This should have occurred to me sooner, or in other words it should not have come as a surprise at all, because it was built into our trip to the UK. Would I have used the time differently?
More importantly, is a 24-hour sprint a useful tool for other situations? Whether being awake for 24 hours feels interesting, fun, or terrible depends entirely on the reason and your attitude going in. After 35 years of chronic insomnia and parasomnia issues, I’m trying to decondition myself from the thoughts that I AM TIRED and I’M BAD AT SLEEPING. What if occasionally being tired was not a problem, but rather a neutral, useful, or interesting experience? The readathon was something that I used to find thrilling, and something that my now-husband and his grade-school-aged daughter looked on with bemusement. I would spend weeks deciding what to read and planning my snacks, my outfit, where I would sit, etc. Then my record was crushed by an adult who read a big stack of YA and kids’ books. Grr! I bowed out after reading all of The Recognitions in 24 hours - finishing just before the clock was up - and retiring on a high note. It’s different when you’re in your early thirties. You’re still used to waking up rung-out after late nights having fun, going to concerts or parties or simply staying up playing cards until all hours. A day of physical exhaustion may be a regular part of your week. All-nighters in college are a mark of grit, and turning in a paper before the deadline or doing well on a test after a cram session are the rewards. Everyone is doing it and it has its bragging rights. If you’ve done it once, then you know you have the capacity to do it again. Lying awake and not sleeping due to mysterious insomnia problems feels bad. It can approach the level of an existential crisis. WHY? Sleep Y U hate me? Yet it’s the same 24 hours that anyone else has, and not every sleepless person is having the same emotions or the same thoughts. What if we approach sleeplessness with curiosity? I might do it in solidarity with someone. Say if my niece or one of my nephews was up studying, although they undoubtedly have study partners for that. If a friend was running a relay race, I might go out and support. The same sleeplessness I can experience on a hot pillowcase at home could feel like an act of friendship or compassion or service. On rare occasions, when I’ve been writing at night or my sleep schedule has been bonkers, I’ve done what I call a “reset.” Stay up, go out into natural daylight, walk all over town, eat an early dinner, and force myself to remain awake until 9:00 PM, when I am then able to fall fast asleep. It’s possible then to sleep for as much as 12 hours, if you can, and be back on a more-or-less normal schedule. In this sense, being awake for 24 hours can be a useful tool. What happened in this most recent case is that I went to bed a little early in Edinburgh, knowing we had to get up and leave for the airport. I woke up an hour before the alarm. What followed was twenty hours of moving through three airports, two sets of security, customs, and a rideshare, bookended by getting ready and bag-wrangling. Much of the time vanished while shuffling through mild chaos or eating meals on a tiny plastic shingle. Close to fifteen hours, though, involved sitting quietly still in a confined space and trying not to bother the eight other people sitting within three feet. Through experience I know when it’s better to stay awake to fight jet lag. I understand that the payoff is a quick and relatively painless adjustment, rather than up to three weeks of brain miasma. There was a ten-minute period when I caved, but after putting my head down on my lap tray I was delivered from temptation by sheer discomfort. What did I do with the “bonus time” of being in jet lag limbo? I caught up on my travel journal, which I’ve never successfully done before. I took notes about our trip and added items to our travel checklist while they were fresh in my mind. I discovered that I was unable to work offline on email, which was Plan A. Having no keyboard, I didn’t plan to do any extensive writing. I read a non-fiction book. I planned out an online workshop. Almost the entire trip, I read through my perpetually out-of-control news queue, which now feels totally manageable. There are so many things that we never feel we have “enough time” to do. Culturally, we all tend to be exhausted and over-scheduled. Thus it says a lot when we’re trapped in a situation when there are very few options for activities. What do you do when you can’t sleep, can’t exercise, can’t call a friend, can’t check social media, can’t clean your house or run errands? Now I have my own personal image of what it looks and feels like to actually read all the articles I have bookmarked. When I inevitably start getting all crazy and saving dozens more, I can ask myself, when do I think I am going to have fifteen hours to read all this? Am I afraid I’m going to run out? When we came home, our apartment was clean, the way I left it. There were clean sheets on the bed. Our only problems would be washing the two loads of laundry we brought home from our trip and stocking our now-empty fridge with groceries. Another person might use a 24-hour reset experiment to clear out closets and do chores, and manifest the same all-caught-up, nothing-left-to-do feeling that I have now. The real question is, how long can it last before we mess it all up again? What do we do with the very next 24 hours, and the next? No matter how much research you do in advance, there will always be something that surprises you when you travel. This is mostly great, because that’s where delight comes in. Sometimes, though, the things you don’t know can be annoying, expensive, or even disastrous. (A lot of people get in over their heads when they try something new and seemingly innocuous like bungee jumping, snorkeling, or riding a scooter). Here, then, is a random list of things I would have liked to know in advance.
MOST IMPORTANT: A lot of public restrooms cost a coin to get in, and if it’s the wrong currency or denomination, too bad, tell it to the machine. If you are standing in front of a coin-operated restroom, there is not going to be a public toilet anywhere near you for, oh, probably a mile. Denham’s Law: The less expensive something is, the harder it will be to pay for it and the more you will need it. 20 pence to use a public restroom, 50 cents to pump up your bike tire, $2 or less to wash a load of laundry - it’s probably easier to get a car loan at 9 PM in some cities in the world than it is to find somewhere to pee. Denham’s Second Law: No matter how much research you do, you will accidentally violate social mores. Probably nobody will tell you. In general, what worked at one hotel in a chain may not be true at another hotel in the same chain, including how to unlock the door, turn on the lights, use the faucet, change the water temperature in the shower, use the thermostat, open the curtains, or flush the toilet. The same is true in public restrooms, where you will have to relearn how to lock a stall, find the soap, activate the faucets and hand dryers, or find paper towels time after time. What floor is the “second floor” is completely arbitrary from one part of the world to another. You will think you have left something behind, and then find it later in your luggage, and you will also forget to bring things that you were sure you had packed, and you will inevitably lose something. Just hope it isn’t your passport. What is true at the security line in one airport may be completely different from the rules in another security line in another airport. Therefore, you might as well just expect to go barefoot and half-naked, holding your liquids in one bag and anything that uses electricity in another, while abandoning your civil rights altogether. If you’re American, use the Mobile Passport app, but be forewarned that you will have to retake your photo at least sixteen times, and it will not be clear what you’re doing wrong, even after you finally submit one that is acceptable. Your flight will be at a different gate and it will probably be delayed, often at least two or three times. You will land somewhere at an airport where nothing is open, and you will not be able to buy food or that other thing you really needed, whatever it was. (Eye drops, allergy tablets, a charging cable). HBO Go, Amazon Prime Video, and probably other apps know your location. You’ll discover that you can’t necessarily use the same apps you do at home, even though you are paying for your subscription in your country of origin. Likewise, you may suddenly find a paywall on news sites that isn’t there at home. Terminology will be different for everything and may work completely differently than it does in your home country, or other places you’ve been. Examples: In some places, you pay more if you eat the food at a table instead of taking it with you. If you buy anything to bring home, you may have to list it on a tax form at the end of your trip. “Left Luggage” is not the same as “lost and found;” it’s a place where you can pay to drop off your bags for a few hours, aha, but only if you have cash. Containers and food packaging can be confusing, such as when you think you’re buying juice and it’s concentrate that needs to be diluted 4:1. Surprise! Or you think you’re buying juice and it’s really pie filling. Surprise! The good news is, a lot of travel surprises are great. Sometimes you find out that one of your favorite products is significantly cheaper where you’re visiting. Or the wifi is much faster. Or you get much more data on the plan that comes with your SIM card. Or people are better at things that annoy you, like taking turns, standing in line, and picking up their own trash. What I’ve found in traveling is that I generally feel safer on the road than I do at home. Contrary to scare stories, I’ve never been mugged, robbed, assaulted, or scammed while traveling. (At home? Buy me a tea and we’ll talk). I haven’t had food poisoning (possibly because I’m vegan) and I’ve found that my dietary habits are often better supported overseas. People are generally warm, friendly, honest, and kind. The real secret is that we travel in spite of the annoyances because it’s still worth it. This is a big and often amazing world, and it’s good to go out and see as much of it as possible. The more you know, the better prepared you are, the easier it is to do. One of the great fantasy lifestyles of the last decade is that of the digital nomad. Right up there with the social media influencer, I think it’s going to prove to be more of a trend than an enduring occupation. Why? It’s challenging to do, that’s why.
For the past few years, I’ve taken to carrying a small Moleskine or similar bound notebook on trips. My goal has always been to keep a running journal, so I don’t have to lug a laptop around with me all day. It’s much easier to slip into a pocket and pull out, even when there’s only time for a paragraph at a time. The trouble with this system is that I have never successfully recorded an entire trip. I’ve tried, oh, I’ve tried. The same part of my identity that bought a locking diary at age nine feels this really strong urge to record everything for posterity, or at least my own personal dotage. As I get further and further behind in my chronicles, I start feeling more of a sense of urgency. I promise myself that I will “catch up” at the airport, on the plane on the way home, or, worst case scenario, in my own living room. It never happens. Sorry, Future Old Me! The other problem is trying to keep a blog up to date. In the past, I’ve written material weeks ahead of time and scheduled it to auto-post. Then I’ve posted about the trip from the comforts of home, with time to compile recollections and notes from my travel companions. Doing this from the road tends to interfere with the trip itself. You find yourself writing about writing, and then journaling about writing about writing. It’s a textual exercise in navel gazing. The point of travel is to see the world. How can someone do this while simultaneously writing about it, making a meta-trip of the trip? More and more time needs to be allotted to the record-keeping. If you’re into the Quantified Self movement, then you would also be recording your food log, hydration, exercise, hours slept, etc. If you’re a birdwatcher like me, then you’re also tallying sightings for your life list. That’s where the other voice pipes up, the voice that cries CARPE DIEM! and YOLO! (My inner voice is too old for that latter; I keep reading it as You Obviously Like Owls). Stop photographing everything, especially your lunch! Stop trying to fit your online persona’s parallel life onto social media while you yourself are walking in the steps of Today You! It’s a tightrope walk, a precarious balancing act between the living of the adventure and the artistic representation thereof. My fantasy has been to do this full time. How great it would be to be completely location independent and write while on the road! Let’s just drop everything and travel from place to place as the whim takes us. In the background, the big wet pleading eyes of our dog Spike and the benignant golden gaze of my little gray parrot Noelle stare us down. What then will become of us, they cry poignantly. Never love an animal, it will mess you up like nothing else. There should be hostels in the major cities of the world centered around animal rescues, where lonely animal-loving nomads can drop by for snuggle exchange. That’s what we’ll call it! Snuggle Exchange! There can even be cats that bat people in the face in the middle of the night, yowling for their 5 AM feeding while sleepy tourists respond “All right, all right already!” Sounds perfect. The real problem, and I’ve read this in the blogs of other nomads, is that seeing the world interferes with getting any kind of work done. A huge amount of time can be spent on the simple transactional aspects of travel, while normal chores like banking and grocery shopping and laundry still need to be done. You’re forever checking in and out of hotels, waiting at bus stops, packing and repacking luggage. It’s a huge part of the fun and the feeling that a real adventure is being had, but it’s also a recurring pain in the neck, sometimes literally. A flat pillow has been the cause of so many disappointing days and so many stupid quarrels, probably for several millennia. Didn’t Marcus Aurelius write about flat pillows? (Not looking that one up because I specifically remember him telling himself off about the desire for a warm soft bed). The other thing that goes well with pillows is the act of reading. On this trip as with all others, I have counseled Future Me that there won’t be as much time to read as usual, and to plan around at least a 50% reduction. Really it’s more like 90%. The time that Imaginary Me is supposedly reading a novel is also the time that Aspirational Me is supposedly writing in the little black journal, and in reality Today Me is trying to identify a flock of what will turn out to be jackdaws. There’s always a tradeoff, isn’t there? Why can’t I be Default Me and Aspirational Me at the same time? Why can’t there simply be three of me, one to do the great things, one to do the secret cute habits, and the third to write about it all and make it sound like the stuff of legend? We’re sort of pulling it off today. We walked in the woods, ate in a cafe, ventured into the countryside, saw some new birds, visited two castles, learned about history, tried new foods, bought a bag of custard donuts, read a few news articles, and now my mate is cooking dinner while I’m “working.” {tee hee, she went} It could be done, it could be done. It could be done with a smooth enough road and enough bus travel, enough convenience foods and a patient enough helpmeet. If nothing else, writing about it might convince others that living on the road isn’t always very adventurous, and the comforts of home are well worth appreciating. For a minimalist, I sure have a lot of luggage. That’s because I travel a lot, and what is ideal for one trip is a poor choice for a different trip. I’ve tended to think of my suitcase as the city bag, and my backpack as the camping bag. On our most recent trip, my husband convinced me that we should bring backpacks instead of suitcases, and it turns out he was right.
Suitcases are probably the root cause of many travel problems. See, a backpack is a constant reminder that you will be carrying the weight of everything you put in it. Unlike a suitcase, it’s shaped around your body. You can’t not think about your back and shoulders. A suitcase can be sat on. Cramming in more stuff seems like it might be a good idea, because you can sit on it when it’s too full to pull the zipper closed. Most people probably only own one suitcase, or share a set among a family. That means they’re always bringing the same size of bag for every trip, no matter where they’re going or how long they’re staying. That leads to bringing the same amount of stuff whether anyone needs it or not. Everyone I know who goes backpacking owns two or three bags of different sizes and use cases. Day pack, expedition pack, hydration pack, maybe even a doggy backpack. I knew I didn’t want to bring my expedition pack on this trip, because we wouldn’t be camping and I wouldn’t need to bring bedding, a tent, a first aid kit, a cookpot, or any of that type of gear. If I had the big bag, I’d be tempted to fill it with ten changes of clothes and four pairs of shoes. I could hear Future Me cussing myself out. THEY HAVE LAUNDRY ROOMS IN OTHER PARTS OF THE WORLD I can be a flaming skinflint at times, and it’s tough for me to lay down the money on something expensive like a new backpack. There’s a part of me that still thinks $40 is a lot of money, the part that still thinks in 1980s prices, and anything more than that goes down the mental CANNOT AFFORD oubliette. We amortize these things, though. When we spend money on things we actually use, they pay for themselves. It’s the stuff we buy and don’t use, like clothes we never wear or groceries that we throw out uneaten, that costs us. My husband pointed out, when we were buying our camping gear for our big Iceland trip, that we would save so much money by not renting a car or staying in hotels that the gear would pay for itself several times over. We could literally leave it all in a pile before we got on our plane home and still save money. Instead, every single piece of it is still in active use several years later. Not only does buying high-end gear pay for itself over time, it changes the nature of how we spend our time. Investing in a bunch of backpacking gear made us think of ourselves as backpackers. We went on to save money traveling in Spain the same way. Part of why suitcases lead to worse travel experiences is that they leave open a lot of default behavior. Overpacking is a “stuff problem” and it is also a time problem. Choosing and folding and packing more stuff takes longer. That’s part of where people start pushing the limit on how late they can leave for the airport. It’s hard on the way there, and it’s even harder on the way back, because time packing is time robbed from the trip itself. We cut the time table too close, and then we’re throwing things over our shoulder into the gaping maw of the huge bag. It never fits as well the second time! When I use a suitcase, I don’t fold or roll my clothes and I don’t use packing cubes, either. I line up the shoulders and waistbands with the edge of the suitcase, then fold in the sleeves and pant legs and hemlines. Smallclothes like socks fit around the edges. I know it will all fit because I only bring four changes of clothes. (Often the same stuff I wore last time I went somewhere). I can pack my bag in under five minutes. I can pack in under five minutes because I have experience, and also because I have discipline. I can play dress-up in my closet at home any time. I don’t want to spend time on my trip, expensive time I might add, with my finger on my lip musing over what to wear. We’re essentially paying by the minute when we’re traveling, and I can watch the dial on that mental meter spinning and spinning. A funny moment came up on our last day in London that proved my husband’s point about the backpacks. We had decided to visit the British Museum, conveniently near our train station, and we had already checked out of our hotel. We took the Underground and walked several blocks. NO ROLLER BAGS ALLOWED We paid to check our backpacks at the coat check. Five pounds each, the most expensive end of the rate schedule. Bags over 8 kg not permitted. They have a big scale embedded in the countertop, and they weigh all the bags to see how much to charge. My husband’s bag hit 8 kg precisely. Mine was 9.5! I quickly estimated what I would need to remove, and got out a bottle of water, my iPad, a book, and my bag of Starburst. 8.1 but they let me check it at that point. The moral: if we had brought roller bags, or heavier backpacks, we would have had to leave the museum and find a locker at the train station, then come back. It would have cost us an hour of precious time. For what? Another change of clothes that we won’t even remember wearing? (Incidentally, 8 kg is a little over 17 lbs and 9.5 is 20 lbs). A backpack is superior to a suitcase in most situations, whether they are stairs, cobblestones, museum coat checks, or a sprint through a terminal. If this backpack, like ours, fits in the overhead bin or under the seat, it can also rule out waiting at baggage claims, searching for lost bags, or paying overweight luggage fees. Now that I have this new bag, I’m going to have to figure out more trips so I can continue to amortize the investment. My hubby said so. |
AuthorI've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years. I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
January 2022
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