Wednesday, March 29, 2023

I Used to Love Traveling ...

... and, specifically, driving to distant places.

I stopped driving nearly 20 years ago, but am thinking about taking it back up, because Tamara doesn't much care for long road trips if she has to do all of it.

Flying lost its thrill for me long ago. Back in the day (1980s and after), you had plenty of leg room, your seat tilted back, and actually getting to and on the fucking plane involved throwing your bag on a conveyor belt for an X-ray, not running a gauntlet of uniformed creeps who like to grope people and are allowed to do so at will. Now there's that gauntlet, and the plane is usually about as physically comfortable as a jam-packed Greyhound bus. I do still enjoy looking out the window, but that's about all.

I'd like to get back to traveling for pure pleasure a little more (and we're driving to Atlanta in may to see Dead and Company in concert). The only "real leisure" trip of multi-day length I've taken in about forever (call it 25 years) was in 2021 when reader GregL took mercy on me and treated me to PorcFest. Everything else has been "going to funerals," "visiting family because I know funerals are coming soon," and Libertarian Party business stuff (conventions, national committee meetings, platform committee meetings, etc.).

Not that I didn't work any recreation into those things. I had plenty of good times.  But I'm really, really, really hoping to talk Tamara into picking a place to go for at least a long weekend, maybe even a week, and actually saying "my work output during this time frame will not amount to even one joule" and sticking to that. New Orleans is a possibility. Or maybe a beach town here in Florida. Or, maybe, I can talk her into going to Arizona and looking at lots in Golden Valley (she's resistant to the idea of desert retirement).

So anyway, I'm traveling tomorrow through Sunday, for a kinda sorta "funeral" -- the interment of my brother's ashes in Racine, Wisconsin.

There will be good times. I love my sister-in-law to death, and we've already planned a meal at a local Thai place that serves volcano chicken (mostly a metro Milwaukee thing that I can't find down here). I might go do the not-quite-polar-bear-club thing in Lake Michigan because that's how I roll. And so on and so forth.

But it will be somewhat stressful, and I will be doing as much work as I can while it's going on. I expect I'll miss at least one, maybe two, Garrison Center columns, but my co-worker Joel Schlosberg might be filling one of those slots. That whole thing isn't so much a time management problem, or a "travel computer rig" problem, as it is a "getting the solitude to think an op-ed through" problem. Maybe I'll get that worked out.

Right now, I'm on a brief "how about a blog post?" break from getting as much content pre-scheduled for Rational Review News Digest as I can, since a non-trivial part of my usual workday schedule tomorrow will be spent on planes and such. And I'm hoping to get to bed by 8pm at the very latest, because RRND's email edition will be coming out at 2am instead of 6-8am tomorrow morning, and I'll want to get some other work done before heading to the airport pre-dawn. That and lecture the remaining family on e.g. feeding of pets and so forth so they don't all starve in my absence.

If you don't see anything here at the blog (other than the daily Wordle hint, which I will do my damnedest to find the five minutes to get done), you'll know why. Have a great weekend.

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