Travel Plans

Okay, 2 posts ago (Travel, Millions, Mind) I confessed to being organized. Um, maybe uh, enthusiastically organized. I research purchases, I study maps, I check in with my personal taste and preferences, and consult my sweetie pie (or the stars, or the dog if no one else is offering an opinion.)

We are off to NYC and, then, to friends and family.

Getting the dates right so that everyone is available in the right sequence was a 5 week extravaganza of emails and phone calls. Everyone is lined up now and we’re all getting excited.

Next, was the desire to have someone in our house with our dog. Usually, our kids would be able to invite RK (Racoon Killer) into their home but they will be on holidays the same weeks we are. Even if they hadn’t been, we were hopeful that someone would be in the house. We have a close-knit neighbourhood and there would be many eyes on the house during the day. Crime isn’t a huge issue, but we don’t have a fortress-type house. No car in the driveway, the porch-light suspiciously on all day, the free community newspapers piling up ….

I had preliminary plans for the newspapers, had begun the research on timers for the hoses, and put out the call for dog-lovers. At this point the Canfield of Dreams clan burst into my email (click & check up on them, now.) A couple of weeks and a thousand hours of end of a teacher’s year later, Joel Canfield was writing about a lull in their planning and readiness – and I was screeching into high gear, about to make a list.

Understand, most of my travelling has either been the throw the backpack in the back of the Volvo (used to always be aired, re-stocked, and ready-to-go) or some seriously convoluted month or two-type adventure. The kind of thing where a pair of light-weight flip-flops would generally work as “good” shoes. Ignoring a wedding, or two, an ordination, a funeral, that were typically short jaunts, I have been packing to conserve ounces of weight and millimetres of space.

New York City demands, in my mind, some of my funkier fashion offerings and excellent shoes. Most of my shoes are comfortable, but not walk for 6 hours comfortable.

Line-ups

I am not a line-up person. We spent $100,000 more on our house than we might have if we’d been willing to commute. Commuting is ecologically insupportable, as well as insufferable for the time it wastes. How will I manage a city full of tourist line-ups? Sure, we could avoid the Empire State Building and the Museum of Modern Art, but those are a couple of things that we want to see. We bought a special pass that will take us to the front of the line – or at least to the back of the front-of-the-line line. You get my point.

Waiting

Any excuse to show off my Fleuvogs!

Add the possibility that we have to wait for public transit, or the hop-on-hop-off bus. I see a lot of walking. We’re big walkers – mid-size(!) walkers. Conclusion? A pair of walking shoes – I wear MBT “rocking” shoes, slightly odd and therefore acceptable to my fashion sense, at least 2 pairs of gorgeous shoes, some flip-flops for my sister-in-law’s beach, shoes for cycling in the memorial bike ride for my mother-in-law, and space for a great New York City shoe bargain. (Bargains are not necessarily cheap, just in case you think I’m deluded. Degree of desirability minus the square of income divided by the number of hours of possible wear times 4, cosine of the angle of the sun, multiplied by the estimated number of hours one’s sweetie pie is going to tolerate this type of activity, and voila … bargain/no bargain. )

I will do a similar plan for shirts, bottoms, underthings, over-things, going-out things, sporting things, jewels, and the possibility of hot, cold, wet, dry, humid, breezy. Exhausting.

Still on my list: a binder of all the things I would like to communicate to the Canfield of Dreams team. Sure, I would like to help them out and get them oriented. They will only be here a short while and I think it would be reassuring for them to have a number and address for the nearest, recommended medical clinic, the hospital, the best value grocery shopping, and dog info, et-cetera. More than my impulse toward helpfulness is the knowledge that if I don’t spend some time writing and gathering interesting, helpful, and necessary information, I will wake myself up at 3:00 am in my hotel, overlooking Central Park and think, “Oh, I should have told them that closing all the upstairs windows and turning on the bathroom fan early in the day can increase the chances of sleep-ability up there on a hot day.” No offence Canfields, but I so don’t want to be thinking about you at 3:00 a.m. in New York City.

Off to organize!