Travel Planning

A couple of things about me.

One, I don’t keep secrets well. I have a very very hard time not talking about stuff that’s going on.

For the most part, my life is an open book. I have some stuff going on right now that I shouldn’t talk about, so I’m practically strangling trying NOT to post about it. This is keeping me from saying much at the moment.

So, sorry about the apparent writer’s block.

Two, the most ridiculous crap imaginable happens to me. If you hear that someone in my neighborhood was struck by lightning, it was me.

I’ll be fine, and I’ll walk away from it with nothing worse than a bad hair day, but if someone in my immediate area is gonna get hit with 1.21 gigawatts, I’m your huckleberry.

An old friend of mine used to call this the “bad luck of the Irish”. She meant that something terrible was always nearly happening to me. People who have traveled anywhere with me can testify to this, too.

Sailing across the Catalina channel at 2am, who gets hit in the face with a flying fish and has a black eye for a week?

Me.

Taking a water taxi from the mainland to a small island in Belize, who first hears the noise that signifies a broken crankshaft?

Me.

Landing in Jakarta, who finds out that they are the ONLY person that the tour company forgot, and has no plans, reservations, or transportation for?

Me, again.

Lost in Cancun at 3am on a Wednesday?

Yep, it was me.

Buying our bedroom furniture was an adventure that takes twenty minutes to tell, so I’ll give you that one later. Do you know the Spanish word for “nightstand”?

Neither do I.

I thought everyone’s life was like this, and it wasn’t until I started comparing notes with people that I realized that most of y’all have perfectly reasonable lives, where things go according to plan.

I cannot even imagine how that feels.

Anyway, this has come up recently because I’ve been talking to my husband about travel. I haven’t gone on any wild adventures in a while, and I’m feeling like at the very least we should visit the Grand Canyon (although I’d probably fall in, so maybe a shallower destination is warranted). I could get snakebite in the wilds of the desert or something.

Or some coastal sailing, around the Channel Islands might be a good idea. I’ve rolled a boat over in bad weather when I was alone, hours from shore, so this time I’m due for something safer, like slipping off the anchorage and running aground in the middle of the night.

He is a little hesitant. I nearly killed us driving to a cheap restaurant a couple of nights ago, and he is reluctant to go anywhere more dangerous than the back yard. (Which of course is full of big hairy spiders and marauding raccoons, so maybe that’s a bad choice on his part.)

It isn’t that Jesse is a coward. Not at all. He has rescued me from quite a few horrifying predicaments, so he can’t possibly be a coward.

He just knows that I will end up in brand new predicaments, and I will be laughing like a lunatic, thoroughly enjoying myself and he’s pretty sure that means he’s stuck with a crazy woman which by extension means that he’s crazy, too.

So I’m considering travel and insanity. Jesse is thinking of a protective restraining order, or a nice rest home. I’ll let you know who wins the argument.