I've gotten a little better with the clothes packing; I generally come home from a trip with everything worn, plus or minus that extra pair of underpants I threw in just in case.

But I still take along too much stuff-stuff: books, magazines, and a to-do list sixteen days long called All the Crap on My Laptop. If I were flying to Perth and back with four layovers and weather delays at each, I wouldn't have the time to get through the stack of New Yorkers alone, much less all the projects I plan to fill my many, many idle hours of travel with.

Here's what I ended up doing: walking...a lot. Eating...a lot. Doing that thing you do in motel rooms a lot...a lot. (What? You don't watch late-night cable and drink bourbon when you're on vacation? Wackos.)

And in those few waking hours when I wasn't hanging out with some nice Bloomingtonian or walking the farm or driving around The Half-Blind BF (he lost a contact mid-trip), did I do the work I brought with me to do? Oh, no. I walked around a bookstore, looking for more not-work to do.

So how is it that on the way home, my baggage felt significantly lighter? And that this morning, despite a delayed flight (where yet more work did not get done) which also delayed bedtime until 2 am, I woke up feeling rested and refreshed instead of anxious and fretful?

Yeah. I guess I got my work done on this trip, after all...

xxx c

Photo by Sidereal via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.