I am traveling. M is with me. I’m going to spare you details and annoying pics (because, why?), but I’ll share my current revelation: I am a terrible traveler.
While I love being somewhere else, a few things are also true:
1. I suffer from jet lag like an infant, incapable of making sense of the difference in time. Everyone around me is sleeping through the night and almost a week in, I’m wide awake, bumping into things in the dark and swearing under my breath. (It is 2.30 am where I am, and M, God bless his smart-wool socks, is snoring next to me. I am trying to think kind thoughts but it is not easy.) I manage to get on local time at the airport heading home, just in time to spend a good week wide awake on home soil. (M is convinced this is somehow connected to my refusal to change my watch to local time. None of me understands how this is related.)
2. I do not have the stomach of an intrepid food traveler. Not much of a foodie, I can still be tempted (read: shamed) into the occasional food-travel, chasing down some foreign delicacy and letting M take a pic of me eating it. (You will never see the pics — again, why?) This inevitably results in M having to Google late night pharmacies so he can buy everything that looks like Pepto-Bismol while I lie curled on a bathroom floor, sometimes staring up at a bidet.
3. It also turns out that while I like being somewhere else, unless a train is involved, I hate getting there. My kids throw up in relay form when we we get in the car (and the car is the minivan, and nobody has ever been happy in a minivan for over an hour), and as it happens, I don’t like to fly. I used to think I only got nervous at take off and landing, but apparently I’m also anxious at the in between points. (Also, I get one zit for every hour I spend on a plane, so there’s that.)
4. I am lazy and I married the least lazy human alive. Apparently lying in bed watching foreign television (or a personal favorite: old American soaps dubbed in a foreign language which makes me think I spent years studying languages just so I could watch The Bold and the Beautiful all over the world) does not hold a candle to castle tours, walking tours, church tours, you get the drift. Also, a limited attention span does not make for a good member of a group tour. I have about 45 minutes and then I’m ready for a coffee shop or book shop or shoe shop. Again, I’m sure you see where I’m going. (Note to self: Europeans have small feet and you will be shamed if you try to shoe shop. Stick to books and coffee.) I am always appreciative of his enthusiasm and initiative, I just try not go overboard in showing it.
None of this stops me from perusing local real estate, contemplating an expat life, and working out how we will tell the kids we are moving. I’m nothing if not inconsistent. Like I said, I’m more than happy to be somewhere else, as long as I don’t have to fly, eat or sleep through the night.
I should go. We are scheduled for an early morning monastery tour.
I will put up one picture, which confirms my long-held belief that clothes driers are the devil. It seems I am not alone.