“Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.” Paul Theroux

In my dotage, I’m incurably drawn to travel. It’s hard to understand because these days, travel is a drag. Back when I was young, it was different. People dressed up to travel and service was everywhere. There were porters, bell hops and skycaps, eager to help you board. Travel was exciting.

Enhanced Pat down Getty Images via @daylife)

These days, service is hard to find; getting on a plane requires standing in long lines, awkward screening procedures to ensure that you won’t blow up the plane and embarrassing wardrobe adjustments. By the time you reach the relative sanity of the boarding area, all sense of adventure has been drained and even if you started off dressed to kill, you now appear to have spent the night sleeping in the waiting room. And you still have to board the plane.

In the old days, you used to check your luggage leaving you with a briefcase, purse or other case to take on the plane. You boarded, found your seat and waited. Now, you stand in line to board, wait forever while your travel companions wheel steamer trunk sized luggage on board and heft it in the overhead bins. Boarding is interminable and then you have to squeeze into seats designed for underweight midgets. Heaven forbid you have the aisle and get seated before your 300 pound travel mate takes the center seat.  Air travel these days gives a whole new meaning to intimacy.

Back then there were complimentary soft drinks, snacks and on long flights a meal. These days, you might get a drink but nothing else is free. Thank heaven the airports have food concessions but that just means more for you to lug on board.

So air travel isn’t what it used to be. Why do it?

For me, it is spending some time in a different world. Like I said earlier, I didn’t do much traveling in my younger years. I spent a summer in Europe when I was in graduate school and at the time imagined that I’d do much more. The realities of career and family made that impossible so now with impending decrepitude staring me in the face, my wife and I decided to go for it. We spent two weeks in Venice earlier this year to see how two old coots could manage. We didn’t take the tour and we stayed out of hotels. Renting an apartment was cheaper and we used frequent flier miles accumulated from work. It wasn’t much more expensive than staying home. The big question was would we get bored.

Come back next week for the continuation of the story.

Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

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Getting out of bed in the morning is an act of false confidence.  Jules Feiffer

It’s been a week since we got back from Argentina and life is beginning to get back to normal.  I have to say that taking a long trip makes you stop and think about what is so wonderful about normal.  Normal is what you are trying to get away from.   In truth, normal is a comfort zone.  It is the environment that allows you to relax and stop worrying about everything that might go wrong.   But normal is what makes the trains run on time and gets the bills paid so we are working on getting back to normal.

In Argentina we were gradually drawn into the life schedule of Argentinians.  We began eating later in the evening and not being so concerned about getting up in the morning.  It didn’t happen overnight.  It just crept into our lives.  At first we didn’t even notice.  The biggest reason is that you can’t find any restaurants that serve dinner before 8:00.  At 8:00 they will let you sit down and   give you a menu but it will probably be at least 30 minutes before they will get you a drink or take an order.  Still, when you get your food at 9:00 or so, the restaurant will be deserted and only start to fill when you leave at 10:00.  I’m not complaining about that.  It is just one of the weird quirks of the Argentine lifestyle.  They aren’t going to change it for us and so we coped.  What we didn’t anticipate were the consequences of eating later.

Each morning, we got out of bed later and later.  By our last week, nine in the morning seemed early.  There were no consequences of this change because as tourists, nine was plenty of time to do our sightseeing.  The downside of our new lifestyle pattern didn’t hit until we got back.  All this week I have struggled to get out of bed in the morning.

There are plenty of excuses.  Buenos Aires is four hours ahead of California which is enough of a difference to mess up your inner clock.  I would wake up at 2:00 or so and then get back to sleep expecting to wake up at 7:00.  I slept until 9 and even then didn’t want to get out of bed.  There was nothing to look forward to.  We weren’t on vacation any more but we didn’t have any work commitments either.  We were still putting stuff away and getting the house back in shape.  Nothing to look forward to about that.

Even when life began to become more normal, I couldn’t get myself out of bed each morning.  I’m still struggling to get up before 9:00.  It can’t still be the Argentine lifestyle because we’ve been eating at our normal time and getting to bed around 10.  Getting enough sleep and getting up bright and early should be easy.  So what’s the problem?

My theory is that it’s the disruption to my old routine- the normal day to day pattern that structured life before our trip.  I had my life figured out back then.  I had a schedule of tasks and priorities and that motivated me to get up and work.  One month with no routine and a relaxed lifestyle has made that confidence disappear.  I’m not sure what my priorities are for today and even less sure what is important and why.  How important is getting that post written?  Will it matter to anybody except me?  What else could I do that would really make a difference.

This, in turn, raises the question about what I know about my priorities anyway.  Am I doing something important or am I more like a dog chasing his tail- busy but going nowhere.   Right now, my getting out of bed each morning is beginning to seem not so important.  In time, I expect this all to pass but whether this should be considered progress or regression, I can’t say.  I am driven to find meaning in life whether it actually exists or not so I expect that next week- or the week after at the latest- I will be back in the groove and focused.  I can only hope that I am doing something that makes a difference.  In any case, by then I will be too busy to spend much time worrying about it.

Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

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