traveling

If you want that airfare -- the one that's at $600 for a round-trip between the Midwest and somewhere across an ocean, these days you have to begin your travels in Chicago. For one reason or another, Madison departures are out of favor, or maybe their cheap fares are snapped up too quickly for my greedy hands to get to them. So we gratefully steal a ride with my daughter to town, take that (three hour) bus to Chicago, and there we begin our flight travels.





You are not allowed to complain when you travel for pleasure. That's my rule. You could have stayed home, you could have had your comforts and delights right there on the couch, but no -- you chose this and no one wants to hear now how imperfect your life is at the moment.

Except, truthfully, I have no complaints. Oh, I get frustrated with the occasional hold up here and there (though not today!), but at home, I get frustrated with the roof icing over. Frustrations are there for you to feel like you are a living human being rather than a robot moving effortlessly from one set of instructions to the next.

In travel, I find that most often, everything works out beautifully in the end. Except on those rare occasions where everything, everything goes wrong and you are stuck in a vortex of mishaps and you know that they will continue until the day ends and you bury your head in a pillow and forget it all and hope that the next day starts with a clean slate.

So today nothing has gone wrong and I'm here with Ed in Chicago (Ed's coming along, how cool is that!) waiting for that first flight which will take us -- of all exciting places -- to Detroit. From there, we catch the overnight Air France to Paris, where we will spend no time at all and the connections will continue and I'll write more about them once we've crossed the Atlantic.

As always, teşekkür ederim for your comments (I'm zoning into a new language for the days ahead). Yesterday's and those you're thinking of writing in future days. I'm even more grateful for them when I travel and familiar words and known faces are far far away.