I’ve just gotten back from a lovely four-day sojourn to California. The less said about the actual physical sojourning, the better, I suspect, although I would like to take this opportunity to thank the guy who accidentally whapped me in the head with his surfboard at one o’clock this morning, as I wandered lost and alone through the Continental Airlines “Baggage Of The Damned” area looking for my inexplicably-sent-on-an-earlier-flight-and-impossible-to-find-because-cleverly-purchased-in-the-color-black suitcase, because then I had a legitimate reason to plop my ass down on the scuzzy floor like a toddler who has just lost her balance and burst into tears, tears that I had sensed in the offing ever since wandering into the ladies’ room and catching sight of my utterly disheveled self in the mirror, my cardigan buttoned all wrong and not even concealing the in-flight “meal” stain that I’d donned it to hide in the first place (and don’t get me started on said “meal,” which clearly took shape in the mind of an evil and extremely bored Continental food services executive bent on testing the theory that the average American either cannot distinguish the difference between chicken lasagna and vomit or, if confined to a metal tube at thirty thousand feet, will elect not to care that the words “pre-digested for your convenience” appear on the shrink wrap of his or her meal), broken shoelace retied unconvincingly, the sunburn on my scalp starting to peel and giving me a weird non-dandruff dandruff that I felt compelled to explain to total strangers (“yeah, it’s a sunburn that’s peeling, not dandruff, really, ’cause, see, I went to Fire Island last weekend, and – hey, where’re you going?”), a giant throbbing pimple on my chin that I could feel slowly ramping up its life force a la the boil in How To Get Ahead In Advertising and causing nightmarish visions in my head of said zit using my credit cards and showing up in my stead at social functions – oh, dear, I seem to have digressed myself into the Midwest somewhere. Anyway, back to the point, namely that while I enjoy traveling as a concept, traveling as an actual activity annoys me to the point of rash.

Preparing to travel probably wracks my nerves the worst, suffering as I do from the joint maladies of disorganization and acute anal-retentiveness. When I say that my pre-trip to-do lists usually include a notation to myself to “bring suitcase,” immediately followed by “bring suitcase onto elevator” and “bring suitcase off of elevator and out to street,” I do not exaggerate; if one of these items remains unchecked on the list, you may rest assured that my suitcase is in my foyer, or in the hallway on the ninth floor, or merrily riding up and down the elevator in search of me. I live in fear that the first evening of a given vacation will find me sipping a margarita on a friend’s balcony, and that the friend will make conversation by asking who’s minding my cats, and that I will freeze with my glass an inch away from my lower lip and repeat in a horror-stricken tone, “‘Cats’?” and then have to head up to my friend’s roof to position the Bat signal in the sky so that the Dark Avenger can belay down the side of my building and swoop in to keep an eye on the kibble supply. And the packing – oh, the packing. Look up “overpacking” in your dictionary sometime, and there you’ll find an illustrated me, poised over a suitcase so overstuffed that other, smaller suitcases and carry-on items have begun orbiting it, with a thought bubble that reads, “I know it’s the equator and everything, but I’d better bring a parka just in case.” I do not pack what I need. I pack what I might need. Whole boxes of Band-Aids, just in case I get a blister or a paper cut the size of Omaha. Whole drawers of t-shirts, just in case I buy a pair of pants and have trouble matching the t-shirts to the new pants. Extra linens, just in case I have to sleep in a place with no linens, I guess. Extra lotion. Extra tampons. Extra aspirin. Extra shoes, because I have to have cute shoes, cute comfortable shoes, non-cute comfortable shoes, cute sneakers, comfortable sneakers, “real” sneakers (read: sneakers in which I could actually do something sport-ish, despite the near-vanishing-point odds of my ever doing something sport-ish besides watch it on TV while drinking a diet cola), and socks that go with all these shoes. Bras in every color of the rainbow. Twenty-eight pounds of reading material. Just wing it, you say? Impossible. Where’s my sense of adventure? Don’t have one.

See, I like going away. It’s the getting away part that makes me itch. I hate the endless waiting around and the cramped quarters of flying. I like trains okay, and I like driving a lot, but trains and cars take longer most of the time, and don’t even get me started on the bus. To take a trip on a bus (see? I’ve started) is to enter an otherworldly environment in which other people avail themselves blithely of your personal space while at the same time utterly failing to acknowledge your existence, and posting little signs on your person such as “this nostril is a newspaper-page-free zone” and “Sharon The Shoulder sez: No drooling please!” with a red line through it don’t seem to do much good. Bus travelers seem to spend a majority of their time – the time that they don’t spend interviewing other travelers as to their destinations or making sure neighboring vehicles can hear the bass on their CD Walkmans – eating, and eating loudly. Like, I congratulate you on the decision to enjoy a satisfying and delicious Funyun, but please stop rustling the freaking bag, or I will be forced to expedite your headfirst-through-the-windshield departure from the bus. And bus drivers seem to cherish the belief that, if they have to drive a bus for a living, they will drive the hell off the bus and damn the consequences. Sandra Bullock’s character in Speed had nothing on the guy that careened me and Ernie from Siena to Pisa several summers ago – you know that bat-race thing they do between innings at minor-league baseball games, where two contestants put their foreheads on baseball bats and run around the bats in a circle for thirty seconds and then attempt to run to home plate, but when they try to dash for the plate they wind up collapsing in a heap? That’s how we looked getting off the bus in Pisa. The driver didn’t even bring the bus to a complete stop, for god’s sake.

And then there’s the problem of vacationing with others. I like vacationing with others, because vacationing solo can get pretty boring, not to mention expensive. But others often don’t share my love of arriving at the airport three hours early (” just in case.”). Others frequently exact a heavy price for that gas money by snoring. And you just never know what others think when they think “vacation.” When I think “vacation,” I think going to a place, dumping my suitcase in a back bedroom, donning a grubby t-shirt and a pair of flip-flops, and parking it with a Dr. Pepper and a book for the next week. I don’t want to hike. I don’t want to camp. I don’t want to see sights. I want to eat, sleep, read, sleep, guzzle alcohol, and sleep, not necessarily in that order. I will shop, and I will look at cute local boys, but I go on vacation to relax, not to insult the intelligence of my lungs by compelling them to wheeze their way up an Alp. The world is divided into two types of people: the people that go on vacation intending to cram every godforsaken outdoorsy or cultural activity they don’t make time for in their everyday lives into a week; and the people like me who examine the dictionary definition of “vacation” and find the phrase “a scheduled period during which activity is suspended,” and who choose to interpret “activity” as meaning “anything more strenuous than donning clean undergarments and heading to the nearest restaurant.” When the two conflicting types vacation together, it seldom works. The Biscuit belonged to the first group, and vacationing with the Biscuit meant, in his words, “doing something active.” A couple of summers ago, he convinced me to climb a mountain with him. We climbed it. I fell down many, many times. At the top, I lay down on a flat rock and literally passed out for half an hour. Then we climbed back down. I fell down some more. I did enjoy the view (though largely through closed eyelids), and I did get some needed exercise, and I blame my crappy sneakers for all the falling down, and the Biscuit didn’t walk along behind me yelling, “Left! Left! Left, right, left!” or anything. But if I’d had my druthers, I’d have stayed in the hammock with a magazine. The Biscuit spent a lot of time on our vacations convincing me that we should drive to East Of Nowhere to go to a vineyard, or that we should play golf, or that we should get out the Frisbee, and it’s not that I didn’t enjoy these activities – it’s that I had driven eight hours in order do nothing, and it’s nothing I wanted to do. It’s just a difference in style. I can understand wanting to go out and see everything and do lots of things, but I prefer to sit and percolate in my surroundings with a newspaper and a cup of coffee.

I liked my recent getaway for just that reason. I spent a bunch of time traveling, and when I arrived, I just wanted to chill and not run my ass off all over San Francisco, and my lovely hostess Sep had my wavelength. “I have a cat,” she said. “Who needs to go out?” Well, exactly. Then I went to visit my friend Bounder, and a couple of hours in a pool hall represented the sum total of our exertions for the day. That’s a perfect vacation day, in my opinion. Sightsee if you like. Surf, fly a kite, take a gajillion pictures. I’d rather not feel busier on vacation than I do at home, so I’ll just kick back in the hotel lounge with some peanuts and you can tell me all about it at dinner.

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