Of Travel and Being Prepared

Between my day job and speaking at writing conferences, it’s the rare month that I’m not on the road somewhere. This time, it’s Texas, for the day job.

Travel doesn’t hold the same wide-eyed appeal for me that it did when I was nineteen and headed for Minneapolis for the first time in my life. I like my bed. I like the apartment I share with my sister. I love Arlington, and 99% of the time I love what I do for the day job or my stuff on the side. But I still love the opportunity to see new places (like this week, a Texas city where I’ve never been before) or see old friends.

I used to travel light, very light. My ex and I once got through a week in Europe with a single suitcase and a backpack, washing out underwear every couple of days. But then September 11 happened. I was in Los Angeles and was supposed to be flying home the next day at the end of a business trip and had brought precisely as much underwear as I thought I’d need. Fortunately, I was with a coworker who was calm and collected–and who had a very active faith life, which I did not at that time. We cried together… sort of prayed together… and washed out our undies together. She’d been scheduled to fly to northern California on the 12th, but since neither of us like everyone else in the country was going anywhere by plane, she drove and I went along. Finally, on Saturday, we got out… me from the San Jose airport, she from San Francisco.

People laugh now at the way I sometimes overpack for travel these days. Guilty as charged. But as long as I’m sure I have enough clean underwear for a couple extra days, it’s pretty easy to put up with a six-hour delay in Newark or a four-hour delay in Pittsburgh.