Hello, Sailor!

“Nothing happens yet.”

Hello, Sailor!

It’s finally come down to only one day left before we depart. After all the researching and planning for side trips, getting various vaccinations and medications, and scrambling around at work to get things to a state where I can go away for a month and not have things fall apart, it’s finally time for the trip to begin.

Am I ready? Well, I’m not ready to leave, but I am ready to be gone. There’s still the actual packing, perhaps some last minute frantic shopping, and the inevitable (for me) worrying about “Did we remember everything?” “Will our flight be on time, or go at all?” “Will we make our connection?” “Will our bags be routed to our destination, or somewhere else?”

And new for this trip: “Will I miss the boat?”  “Will I be seasick?”  “Will I get rabies from a monkey?” (thanks Erin.)

I guess as usual I will expect to have a great time, and hope that whatever does end up going awry simply makes the stories better; like, “So there we were on the outskirts of London, with only a pound and a half in change, and it was just past midnight, so our all-day transit pass had expired, and we have to make it back to our hostel near the British Museum …” rather than “… and our connection was so late, we would miss our connection to London, and wouldn’t be able to get there until a day later, which would miss the meeting with the professor and the special dinner he planned at the private club near Oxford, so we cancelled the trip, and spent the next hour arguing with the ticket agent to get a refund.”