Travel Planning: Almost as Much Fun as the Trip Itself! (And the Birth Story of this Blog)

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This blog has finally come into being for several reasons.  The first should come as no surprise: I love to travel.  But also, I LOVE spending hours on end planning, researching, and booking my travel.  I doubly love typing up the itinerary and staring at it… and of course going back to all the books and websites I used to arrange the travel plans and stare some more at the pictures of the places I’ll be going to several months hence.  Less fun is trying to get the husband excited about the itinerary nine months in advance of the actual departure date.  He’s the kind of person who starts to get twinges of happy anticipation the day before we leave (huh?). Secondly, I enjoy writing (though not journaling… HATE journaling, though I do force myself to do it on vacations both for posterity and also to aid my increasingly bad memory, though I loathe every second of it while I’m doing it) but my once-a-year Christmas missive just isn’t enough to scratch that writing itch.  A book?  Please.  I once tried to get a children’s book published.  Emphasis on tried.  Won’t be doing that again any time soon.  And so the idea of a blog was born.  That’s the big picture.

On a more recent note, I had spent most of today obsessing over booking our July flight to England, and also booking a rental van – yes van – that we need because the husband is insisting we bring along our two bicycles in a gigantic plastic bike transport box.  More on that in a future post, I’m sure, but suffice it to say that all I could talk and think about today was travel.  Then, earlier this evening, we finally went out to a restaurant for a belated wedding anniversary dinner. (A full night of parent-teacher conferences on our actual anniversary meant I got home, had a reward martini, and went right to sleep.)  A restaurant is an ideal place to get the husband talking about something fun like travel because, aside from a few text dings from his phone, I mostly have his attention.  Thus, a conversation ensued in which we discussed our plans to travel to Skegness where, he said, the seafood was very fresh and voila!, a new word was born: Skegfresh.  We also talked about his plan to have me drop him off at Hunstanton (voila!, more words: Hunstantonople, formerly known as Engstanbul) so he could bicycle around the body of water creatively called The Wash, while I and various members of his family drive the rental van (and probably several other vehicles) to meet him at Skegness, which I could swear is in Scotland, but that’s me getting confused with Inverness.  Anyway, the witty banter was so natural and free-flowing (I did have two Blue Bomber martinis) that he suggested we do a travel podcast together, which I balked at, stating that I am far too introverted.  He’s not given up on pressuring me about that, but for now, he said, how about a blog?  My lunch is packed for tomorrow and the kitchen is mostly clean, so I thought, what the heck (as long as the husband set it up – technology and I are not usually on speaking terms), and here I am (and now he’s insisting I call him my “Tech Commander”).  I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I am already enjoying writing it.