What's Worse?

I’m home now from out west. I put in my five hours on a plane, my knees pressed against my chest and the tray table driving itself into my sternum.Flying is such a joy.I should admit that traveling knees in my mouth is my own choice, because I hate to have to use those overhead bins. People vie so for the space in the overhead bins and I’d just rather not do that if I can help it. All jockeying for position makes me uncomfortable. Not enough testosterone in the mix maybe.Plus what if you need something during the flight and it’s up there in the overhead bin? You then you have to stand up in front of that whole planeful of bored people who are going to WATCH as scraps of luncheon meat rain down on your head because you had them in your raincoat pocket after stopping to refuel your rental car where,realizing how hungry you were, you then bought a package of ham and tore open with your teeth so as to toss most of it down as you zoomed toward the airport and who needs that?It’s embarrassing to find yourself festooned in half-eaten foodstuffs, like our friend Oscar here. ( I remember that sales trip back from Ohio so vividly! All I needed was a banana peel on my head.)Anyway, so now I choose to travel right WITH everything I might need stuffed in my backpack.Which I then jam under the seat in front of me.Which is why my knees are up so high: my feet are resting on it.For this last trip I had craftily poured my coffee into Thermos Number One back in the terminal.I had done a similar thing with Thermos Number Two, filling it with the special brew of lemonade and mint tea I favor.PLUS, I carry my own food, natch. That day it was two boiled eggs and some black beans for the first snack; a small tub of cauliflower and salmon for the second. (I never do tire of the looks on my seatmates’ faces and when I pop the Tupperware tops and release the scent of these dishes into the air. :-) )So, I reasoned, I was all set. I would eat well and drink my drinks straight from the ‘jugs’ .Then all I figured I might need from the flight attendant was a nice cup of ice.She served it to me and 20 minutes later I knocked it over, letting icy water spill all over my lap, soak between my legs clear through to the seat of my pants.Whether or not it worse than wearing shreds of deli meats about my head and shoulders is hard to say but I can certainly attest that it was it was a WHOLE lot lot less comfortable.

Travel Day's Eve

On the eve of every trip-return I’m newly amazed by what feats of compression you can perform to re-pack, since the minute you break the seal on your luggage its contents spill out everywhere. Five days ago I walked into this guest room with a rolling suitcase and a backpack and ten minutes later the place was festooned with my scattered belongings: a diary and an I-Pod on the night stand, a polka dot dress on the chair, another eight or ten articles of clothing in the closet. And more: the pastel corsage of underthings in the bureau and the two books on top of it; three magazines, two silly DVDs bought at the Winn Dixie in case of insomnia and a printout called “When Things Fall Apart” telling how that moment of utter befuddlement is the moment when you’re being given the gift of letting go.Letting go. What if I panic tomorrow at 4am and fail to stuff everything into that suitcase and backpack and thus end up without my nice soft PJs or my bright-blue metal travel mug? What if I get disoriented in these strange pitch-dark mornings and take a wrong turn in my rental car and land in the Gulf of Mexico? Or if my plane goes down like Tom Hanks’s did in Cast Away and I don’t even HAVE a soccer ball to draw a face on and make a friend of?These are things I never think of when I travel but I am thinking of them now.Here, there are palm trees and bright red birds. It was 85 and wild parakeets and butterflies dancing across the bright-green treetops. Tomorrow it will be 85 again here with more bright sunshine spilling on all this plumage. Back home it’s predicted to be in the mid-50s. Dirty mounds of snow loom in the shaded corners of parking lots and our meek robins are still just unpacking their own bags.

Travel Tips

Even a slow learner learns at last. Here, after 25 years of jetting about a few packing tips picked up the hard way. Now I bring these and only these things on an airplane:

• A small suitcase weighing no more than a lady’s purse
• One spare skirt or pair of pants
• Any number of Steve-Nicks-style tops or dresses, weighing less than the down on a baby duck
• The requisite undies and creams

I lived for nearly a week in Europe with just this in September and for nearly a week in Utah just now and it all worked great. I bought one of those super-lightweight-but-indestructible little suitcases that heaves right up into the overhead bin and I was SET.  Everything else I carry in a backpack, everything being:

• the laptop, i-pod, phone
• the GPS for when I exit the ol’ rental car garage
• the wires for all the above, none of which are ever ever even faintly interchangeable
• Well-jacketed fruits like your orange or your apple (never the highly squooshable banana)
• Powdered milk, powdered coffee, powdered sugar substitute
• A toothbrush toothpaste and some floss
• A needle and thread but never any scissors natch. 
• A bit of makeup but not too much out of respect for my healthy fear of Kabuki-style paint jobs
• Reading materials.On this latest trip I had Jonathan’s Franzen’s Freedom, Susan Cheever's Louisa May Alcott, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Michael Patrick MacDonald's All Souls, four old New Yorkers, two Times and a Newsweek.

Oh and my diary and my planner too so that even though the suitcase was easy to tote, the minute I swung theat backpack up onto my shoulders I almost fell right over backwards. Next task: conquer addiction to books made of paper and ink.

(Still, a BIG improvement. Yay for this old dog learning a new trick, with more new tricks ahead!)