Traveling

I dislike traveling.

This will seem like a strange comment coming from someone like me, but it’s true. I don’t like traveling. By traveling I mean leaving home, leaving your sanctuary, your familiar. To leave is to disconnect, to be adrift. It’s exhilarating in one way, draining and tragic in another.

Maybe it’s neither and I complain too much. Still, I have never seen living in the big blue bus as traveling. My home is like yours. I am just as connected to it. It may move from place to place, but I never leave home. Or I try not to anyway. Sometimes you do though.

First I went to Las Vegas for work. Las Vegas is America turned to 11. It’s awful, but also hard to look away. The Strip, where I stayed, is strange place, like being inside a pinball machine, bouncing from bright light to bright light. At least there was good Thai food. I got to see some old friends and make some new ones. It was a lot more fun than I thought it would be, but Las Vegas is still just… too much.

The last night I was there I walked a couple miles to try to get a better sense of the city. I started from my hotel, went down the strip, and turned west at the first street. The desert air was sharp and clear, so dry you worry it’ll start crackling.

Once you’re fifty feet away from the strip Las Vegas becomes an ordinary western city. I walked broad highway-like streets designed never to be walked. I took a convoluted freeway overpass walkway lined with the tents of a homeless village. It was a warm night for January. Several people returned my hello from beneath nylon tarps.

After a while time ran out for my walk and I called a ride. I met some old friends for dinner. It was nice to be around normal people after a week on the strip. It’s exhausting being in crowds in Vegas. The desperation and longing are palpable and it seeps into you. Later I caught another ride straight back to the hotel. I took a cold shower and caught a plane back home before the sun rose.

A couple a weeks later the kids and I boarded a plane for Los Angeles to visit my parents. Corrinne went to Mexico to visit her parents.

Newport Beach, where my parents live, was warm. Warmth in January? Yes, please. The kids got to spend a week with their grandparents, nearly every day of it at the beach. It wasn’t always sunny, but it was never cold, and that was all that mattered.

Even the gray, overcast didn’t dampen anyone’s enthusiasm for the beach. We tried going inland one day, to the La Brea Tar Pits, but despite the bones and fossils, it failed to generate much enthusiasm.

It was funny how much the drive and L.A. traffic dampened the kids’ enthusiasm for it. I’d never really considered it before, but our kids hardly ever spend time in a car. True, we drive all over the country, but it’s rare that they’re in the car for more than a couple hours. On the rare occassionas that they are, at the end of it there’s a whole new world to explore. And it doesn’t happen again for weeks after that.

Our kids have no idea what it’s like to sit in a car seat for hours on end, stuck in traffic after school, or running errands around a city, and the taste they got on this trip left them unimpressed. After that experience we stuck to the beach. Whole worlds to explore there. Even foggy days at the beach beat a car ride any day.

Luckily the gloom only lasted two days. The rest of the time we got to live that luxury that is a southern California January — sunny and 75. We explored the jetties, ate plenty of tacos, and even managed to get some swimming in on the warmest day of our stay.

And then just when we’d found a bit of familiar we were yanked back out of it, disconnected. Slammed in a metal tube and shot back across the country.

I am convinced that future generations will look back, long after the cheap oil is gone and flying is a luxury, if it’s possible at all, and marvel at our extravagances and peculiar habit of air travel, wondering why we did it at all, and ostensibly for fun.

Which is to say, we were all glad to be back home, together.