The Long Goodbye
Today we are in Cambodia, tonight we will be in Bangkok, and tomorrow we will be back on our hilltop. The flight over to Asia took us 32 hours door-to-door with 20 hours of that in the air. The flight east tomorrow will take 15 hours in the air you should require about 22 hours at most door-to-door. But we are really starting our journey back today, so take that into account. We will be traveling for an extra 24 hours or total 46 hours in transit. That means that in a strange way this shorter ride home is proving to be a longer trek overall because of needing to get to a hub city like Bangkok, from which to depart. As always with traveling, the way to combat this is to go into what I call airport mode, which is like a form of suspended animation where you try not to get upset by anything that happens. It’s a form of travelers meditation, and we all have our own way of chanting. Kim plays crossword puzzles and word jumbles and I write stories, watch movies and play solitaire.
I’m not so sure that my travel program is so much different from much of our daily lives, but there is something about being in transit, which is just uncomfortable enough to make us want it all to end. We started saying our farewell to Asia last night at dinner after a brisk round of Rummy Cube with our four traveling companions. This morning we all lingered at breakfast, once again reprising what we liked most or what we liked least on this trip. I’ll bet we do a little bit of the same again tonight at dinner and then we will be done with it. Once we get on the plane tomorrow morning and start the actual eastward movement, I’m sure our thoughts will be focused much more on what we have to do once we get home than on what we’ve just lived through for the last three weeks.
Of the major parts of the world, the area I have generally been least involved with is Asia. I’ve lived for a combined total of 11 years in Latin America, Europe and Canada. I’ve travelled extensively all over those continents and similarly throughout the Middle East and a good deal of Africa and Australia. While I have spent a decent amount of time in Japan, I’ve only touched on the rest of Asia with a few trips to Korea and China and only one meaningful trip to India and SE Asia (I tend not to count the many times I’ve been in Hong Kong and Singapore for business). After this trip I suspect I am largely done with Asia. There remain a few spots like Papua New Guinea, Myanmar, Nepal/Tibet and Mongolia which hold a bit of interest to me, but probably not enough to overcome the inertia involved in mobilizing a trip there. At this point I want mostly to help Kim tick off a few hot from her bucket list and perhaps capture a few more special or bespoke experiences like going through the Drake Passage of Cape Horn or going to the Christmas Markets of Eastern Europe on a river cruise. I’ve done all the peaks, deserts, jungles and beaches that I need to do and I quite frankly do not find prettier spots to relax than I have on my very own hilltop with its gardens and pathways and spa.
And that’s the thing these days… the constant tug-of-war between the comfort of our own home and the attraction to mix it up with some far-flung adventure that takes planning, seems to be the essence of the aging experience. I quit skiing a few years ago. I still motorcycle, though not as much as I used to, so when will I decide it’s time to hang up my travel spurs? Like many of these issues, the answer depends on the exact moment that you ask about it. After an amazing trip like we had last year to Egypt & Jordan, we were ready for more. This year after this Asia trip we are not ready to pack it in, but we are less gung ho as well. I’m not sure there is a way to anticipate this and maybe it takes a bad trip to lock in a hard finish line and we have had no bad trips lately.
What we do have on the horizon is some more travel. We will go to meet my daughter Carolyn and her girls in Tennessee for some Spring Break fun seeing places like Dollywood, Nashville, and Elvis’ birthplace on the Natchez Trace. That will be one week in April. We will go in late June to Virginia Beach for a kids’ gathering for a few days. And we will go in September to the Canadian Maritimes for a week-long motorcycle ride through the fall leaves of Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick. While that is all on the North American continent, that hardly feels like a downshifting of our wanderlust.
So far, Kim and I swear we will travel less each year, and at no time is that resolve stronger than just after we return from parts otherwise unknown. Our pleasure with the comfort of our bed and our routine becomes more and more overwhelming. I am sure we will be mentioning all that to one another as we are playing with little Buddy over the next week. But I am equally certain that ideas will arise and trips will get planned at the margin as we push our way forward and continue our seemingly endless journey into that long goodbye.