By the time you read this, I’ll be visiting friends outside New York City for a week at Christmas. Lucky, lucky me.
This is not, alas, a post how awesome a time I’m having in NYC. I am (wisely, IMHO) writing this before I leave home. Which means, this is a post on what a pain in the backside it is, prepping to cross the country for one flippin’ week.
I love traveling. Let me rephrase that. I love having traveled. I love being in a new place, exploring, finding cool stuff, seeing new things–but I do not love having to travel to get to new places. I do not love commercial airlines, two-hour pre-flight security check-ins, measuring my bags to see if I have the right size luggage or need to go buy something, flying Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve to save myself (a heckuva lot of) money.
I do love car trips if there are cool things to see on the way and I can pull over and look closer if I want to. I do not love “you’ve got four days of vacation, three nights at awesome place NOW GET THERE IMMEDIATELY AND THEN GET BACK FASTER.”
I don’t love packing.
I don’t love peacekeeping between frazzled travel companions forced into close proximity for long periods of time.
I don’t love the stress of being in charge when things (inevitably) go wrong.
But I do love exploring new places, and to do that you have to go new places, so there we are. Traveling is a thing that I do, to get to the fun part.
So first up in the prep–escaping work. You know how you always have piles of stuff on your desk that you need to get to, and then you need to get through ALL OF IT before going on vacation? Yeah.
Yesterday (Friday, when you read this) all my coworkers left early. Some even managed to never come in on Friday, having done their thing Thursday and finished their work. Others came in for an hour or two. My new principal was there before me, but she left at 3. The old principal, now the new principal’s boss (and both of them are my boss) left at 3:30. I was supposed to go at 4. But I didn’t. I was stuck till after 5, because I knew how mucked up things would get if the last things I needed to do were not done.
To be clear, my boss (old boss who is new boss’s boss, who remains the extremely awesome boss whom I adore) told me that if I didn’t get to the stuff, he’d do it Monday. Awesome boss is awesome like that. But.
Reader, we do not leave many detail-ish things to the boss. That never ends well. He’ll do something like, goof up a payment, and try to fix it by reaching out to Payroll when he needed Accounts Payable, he’ll be super polite but also super clueless and both those persons, who know he OUGHT to know better, will probably be annoyed, and won’t feel respected by his cut-through-red-tape (with an undertone of “these rules are silly) methods and then–well, let’s just say generally I wish he’d just asked me to handle it from the beginning. Even if he had to call me on vacation to do it.
So I’ve been working my butt off, early and late, to clear my desk while it’s been a busy couple weeks on top of that, what with new principal and the end of the semester and at home writing deadlines and a new/repeat teenager. I haven’t really thought about the trip.
One problem, it turns out, with planning a trip for Christmas is that the trip then hides in the holiday, and suddenly I’m flipping out that BOTH are only a few days away and I’m NOT READY for either one.
I made a list of things I needed to do to get ready. It included stuff like “make a packing list” and “oh dear squid, that deadline is TUESDAY” and “AUGH!! Why do I do this? If I know I’m flying out on the 24th, why can’t I remember on the 12th or something to START MAKING A PLAN?”
This is a thing with me. I am aware. Eventually, though, the freaking out coalesces. “Okay, laptop, charger–oh, and let’s make sure it’s already charged for the flight…pack clothes, wait, laundry first…I’ll wear that skirt on the plane, and–wait, where are the suitcases we haven’t used once since we moved?”
For the record, the kid’s suitcase was, in fact, in her closet. As I said it was. As she insisted it was not. Several times. She’d tossed it in a storage tub, apparently, so when she stuck her head in the closet she didn’t see it, and that is how you look for something, right?
We never check bags, but we’ll have to this time. We have presents, you see. Hopefully we’ll have enough space coming back…
For that, of course, I had to go buy a duffle. We seasoned travelers (ha!) are accustomed to living for a week out of a weekender (smallish carry-on size) and we didn’t have an extra to check.
And on and on, gotta buy ear plugs and Dramamine and…why isn’t this easier? Why can’t we just get transporters or gates or something invented already?
But. We’ve got a plan. We’re going to the American Museum of Natural History. We’re going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We’re going to the Bronx Zoo and we’re going to see the Statue of Liberty and we’re going to something that sounds awesome called the Cloisters…soon the annoying part will be done and I will be exploring a new-to-me place.
Y’all, I can’t wait. But first, I gotta pack.
Bleh.