I used to love to travel, back when I was a pent-up country boy longing to escape from the rural Pacific Northwest. I remember my first airplane flight, from Portland to Seattle in 1978, and it was thirty minutes of pure liberation. (I also remember the stewardess running up and down the aisle with the beverage cart, because the flight was so short.)
But I am older, and I now have my mother’s nervousness about travelling. Whenever Partner and I go on a trip – even a short one - I go through days and weeks of suffering first. What about the flight? What about the transfers, and the weather?
Shouldn’t we just stay home?
In the past – the very recent past, really – we’d get back from a trip, and I’d look around the apartment, and it looked dusty and dismal and uninteresting, and I would wish intensely that we were still on vacation.
This last trip, just last month, coming back from Orlando, we got back around midnight on Saturday, and I looked around the apartment and thought: Hooray!
Vacations are lovely, and travel is necessary, and a break in routine is imperative for one’s mental health.
But home is home, especially for old ladies like me.
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