There is something about these years when Christmas and New Years fall in the middle of the week (this year it was Thursday) that make the holidays feel like they are somewhat extended. I don’t want to sound like the Grinch, but they seem to be dragging on. Truth be told, our relatives (other than son Tom) left quite briskly on the 26th and Tom did his usual departure on New Years Eve, all of which seems somewhat cauterizing for the holiday season. But for two days now it feels “slow”, mostly because yesterday was Thursday and then today Friday, which means we have a weekend now before the year really seems to get going. I mean, today is January 2nd and things are supposed to be revving up, but not really, because why bother…might as well wait until Monday…it seems only civilized. The calendar is the calendar and those holidays fall during the week most years, so what exactly is this all about? My life in retirement is no longer very dependent on the day of the week, but its hard to ignore the rest of the world and the rest of the world cares about weekends no matter what I think. The weekends effect traffic. The weekends effect travel planning. The weekends change your errand schedules. And the prices of things change based on the weekends. Just yesterday when I was booking flights to Florida for March, I noticed a 25% premium for departing West Palm Beach on a Sunday versus Monday. That may be the ultimate weekend impact, given the “Snowbird” patterns of the East Coast working stiff travel patterns…especially in the era of Trump when everyone seems to want to cluster around Mar-a-Lago as much as they can to either curry favor or at least not risk getting out of favor.
Delta Airlines actually thought I might bite on an upgrade for my flight from West Palm Beach Atlanta (a two hour flight) for $650…crazy. And I am but a lowly Gold Medallion member on Delta at this point, so any chance of an upgrade is out of the question. It’s less about being a fixed-income pensioner and more about wanting to be smart about my purchasing power as a retiree. Let’s face it, retirement now means two things to me. the first is that I really can be flexible on my time and especially given the state of technology, even if I have to do something, have iPad will Travel, right? Then there is the newest phenomenon, which is my reducing waistline. I wouldn’t dream of trying to squeeze into an economy airline seat, but as I mentioned in my last post, this Florida trip will be a test run of how my keister fits into a Delta Comfort seat where I get the aisle, Kim takes the middle and some poor schnook gets the window. Having reduced my waistline by some 6 inches so far and given the added two months to go until that fateful voyage, I’m thinking it will be less traumatic that I fear. I recall one business trip in the mid-80s when I probably weighed 70+ pounds more than this. I had to fly down to Birmingham, Alabama, a place where flights had limited service options. I got stuck with a colleague in the inner two seats of a tight three-seat economy row. The humorous comment I recall at the end of the flight was that despite my efforts to “sit small”, he said he had never before sweated so much on only one side of his body as he had during that flight pressed up against me.
I spent yesterday locking down our travel plans for the first six months (and some beyond that) of 2026. We have something on the books for January, February, March, April, June, July and December. May is currently open and August through November is wide open. When my friend Andy, who reads this blog, spoke to me today about out trip to Florida in March, he commented about how much Kim and I travel. I started to say we really don’t so much, but then realized we had taken three international trips in 2025 (Cape Horn, Tuscany/Malta and England/Scotland/Czech Republic), and its hard to say that’s not a lot. I found myself saying that all we have of an international nature on the books is a motorcycle trip to Ecuador in April, but I stayed quiet. That’s like my son Tom once commenting to Kim after his second youthful trip to China, “You haven’t been to China???” There is no way to have such statements not sound pretentious. But being the planner that I am, if I do not book something international soon for that August to November gap in our dance card, I suspect I might be declaring to the world that we have finally succeeded in actually reducing our international travel like I keep threatening to do. But just hearing myself say that makes me want to talk about planning a new trip to Europe or somewhere. Kim still has a hankering to see Amsterdam and Provence, so we are already talking about another trip…perhaps a dreaded river cruise. I say dreaded because the last one we took back in 2016 up the Danube was OK, but all I remember was seeing a lot of bushes by the side of the river. The accommodations were more cramped than an ocean cruise, but they were still OK. We’ll see where this idea goes from here.
But that brings me to my central comment for this post. I just spoke to my friend Arthur, who is 93 this year and who just lost his wife, Mimi, yesterday. I have spoken to him and he is doing OK, but as he said, there will need to be some adjustments to his life to which he will need to accustom himself. And that’s the way life is. At every stage of life, there are adjustments to be made. If you live life on a straight line, I’m guessing that you don’t have a very full life. How can it be? Life is supposed to have twists and turns and adjustments along the way. Sometimes it’s as tragic as the loss of a loved one…but who among us would sacrifice that experience for the pain and adjustment of that loss. Sometimes its as simple as starting a new year and getting on with planning out how you want to put one foot in front often the other in the coming year. To travel or not to travel. To hunker down and stay on a steady course or throw caution to the wind. I know which way my nature always leads me.
So fuck the “we plan to travel less” program I always yammer on about, we are going to plan a trip somewhere interesting for that August – November gap in our schedule. Maybe it will be another try at a river cruise. Maybe it will be another train ride (we seem to be enjoying those). And maybe it will be some exotic roadtrip through some wild and crazy locale like Ecuador. Every time we think we have run out of interesting place to go or to see, we stumble on an obvious oversight in our thinking. So, to summarize, its only January 2nd and we are back at it. Good for us.