I'm visiting an old friend of mine in Toronto this week. It's the first trip I've taken in about three years that's just for fun - - not for a conference, and not for family stuff either. (I've done far too much of the latter in recent months.) I'll never be a big traveler -- after all, I've finally created a home life and home space that I really love -- why would I want to leave? But it is certainly easier to be going somewhere when it's a desired trip, not a required one.
Yesterday's travel was easy -- and frankly, once I get to an airport and start the journey, I'm pretty mellow about the whole process. I like airports -- drinking coffee and reading are high on my entertainment list anyway, and there's good people watching to boot. It's the two days of keyed-up hyperactivity before I leave on a trip -- and the lack of sleep the night before -- that I wish I could manage to do without. For whatever reason, I suddenly become obsessed with cleaning the house, doing a thousand errands, and completing tasks that I've been procrastinating about for weeks. (Hey, let's go to the DMV! or rearrange all the towels!) And then the night before, no matter how much pre-packing I've done, I'm still up for hours. This time I just embraced it and accepted my weird process. And since I didn't have to drive a rental car or deal with difficult relatives or present a paper upon arrival, who cares if I was a little tired?
And since it is Canada, everything has been so super easy and wonderful: people are incredibly polite and helpful, signs are clear, public transport is easy, and the weather is fantastic. Today we just walked around, ate lunch, hung out, had a fun lazy day. Tomorrow we'll be on a more normal schedule -- part of the plan for this trip is for my friend and I to work on our respective manuscripts. We wrote our dissertations on the buddy system, and figured it was time to kick that into gear for these projects too. So we'll have work sessions interleaved with yoga, dogwalks, and long conversations about life and everything else. Highly, highly restorative.