Thinking Travel

1. Flexibity

2. Improvisation

3. Humor

With every trip I improve these three essential travel skills.

This morning I returned from the Atlanta trip I mentioned in the previous post. In the 48 hours I was traveling I had several opportunities to practice my travel skills:

Flexibility: Twenty minutes before leaving for work on Friday I discovered the hairball that the cat left in my suitcase. Fortunately my clothes were not yet in said suitcase. After 30 seconds of freaking out I grabbed my very old but very wonderful expandable Eagle Creak backpack (which was completely covered in calico cat hair), in which my Eagle Creak packing cubes, folder, and toiletries case perfectly fit.

Improvisation: Because I’d planned to check my suitcase on the plane, I didn’t do the 3-1-1 thing with my liquid and gel items. Once at work, I found out that my colleagues where only taking carry-on bags. I decided I should too. But then I realized that my hair gel bottle was two ounces larger than allowed. Long story short: I carried two day’s worth of gel in one of those horse-pill shaped plastic toy-holding containers you find inside a chocolate Kinder Ueberraschungsei.

Humor: Our 59-minute flight to Atlanta was delayed 5 hours because a certain college football team’s chartered plane had a hydraulics problem. So they took our functioning plane and left us with the “we don’t know when it will be fixed, if we can fix it at all” plane. Things looked bleak but as my good-natured colleagues reminded me, the best thing to do in these situations is laugh. And laugh we did.

In the end, we made it to our destination and back again, safe and sound. And we had some fun along the (long) way.

And really, that’s all that matters.