This month will be crazy-busy for me. I am gone from home every weekend this month, having church visits to Portland, Trinidad, Harrisburg, and Southern California. I will load up on the frequent flyer miles, but I may be too exhausted by the end of all this to appreciate them.
But that is all well and good. Travel time is not wasted time, since the long flights will allow me time to put some thoughts on paper and do a little worldbuilding. Even surrounded by all those people on the plane (notwithstanding the crying babies and too-attentive flight attendants), I can hollow out a space where writing can be done. Really. I’ve done it.
One good thing about all this travel is that I get to take my wife Beth with me on two of those weekends, the one to Trinidad and the one to Harrisburg. It looks like 80 degrees and partly sunny in Port of Spain, which will be a lovely change from the 40s and 50s we’ve been enduring here in Charlotte. It might not be fun in the sun–hey, we are approaching 50 years old here–but it will be R and R. That’s what matters.
The trip to Harrisburg will also contain the side trip to State College, home of Penn State University, where our nephew, Aaron Felling, will be commissioned as an officer in the U.S. Army, a ceremony that we will be proud to attend. He has been a part of the ROTC there throughout his college career, and after he graduates (on the same weekend, which graduation we will not be able to attend), he will head to Fort Benning, Georgia.
When he booked the final trip, my dad really didn’t remember that the last weekend of the month is smack-dab in the middle of the holiday travel season (that’s what happens when you haven’t kept Christmas or New Year’s Day since 1958), but we will be heading into the teeth of the storm, LAX. Pray for sanity. And then we get to drive LA’s wonderfully jammed freeways for a few days before heading back into LAX and the world of frenetic air travel. Yay.
When January comes around, I may just need a vacation.
