Logistics
I'm getting to that point of trip planning where I ought really to be doing more than I am, yet I'm so oppressed by the mundanity of the tasks at hand that I'd rather just watch my new favorite show.
Okay, that sentence was a bit more convoluted than I'd intended.
So far, I've reached a few important (and not so important) milestones in my preparations, but I have so many vital things left to do. Here's a small selection:
- Visas for anywhere
- Definitive travel plan for the first two weeks
- Slightly firmed-up itinerary for the remaining 10+ weeks
- Figuring out what to do with my car while I'm gone
- Figuring out where I'm going to live for my gap week or two
- Figuring out exactly when I'll be leaving, from where, and to where. I don't think any airline will be very accommodating if I show up with a Post-it on which I've written "To: China" in Crayon.
- Getting my jabs and pills (got the appointment and the 'scrips, just need to go get them)
And that's just the stuff I can think of off the top of my head. Admittedly, I have a pretty fat head, but still. Let's compare with the milestones I've reached and passed:
- Found someone surprisingly cool to take over my apartment (though the lease isn't finalized, we have a hand-shakey agreement).
- Spent an obscene amount of money at REI, no small amount of it on underwear.
- Received my new passport.
- Purchased a Rough Guide of the area.
This kind of epitomizes my planning tendencies; I get caught up in technical minutiae which fascinate me, while the actually important yet unexciting things tend to slip through my attentional cracks.
This would explain why I had all the necessary gear and safety equipment for a camping trip to the southern Sierras last year, but had failed to account for the fact that since we were so early in the season, the entire route was still brambles and thorns, and the rangers hadn't bothered to fully mark the trail so we ended up camping in a waterless meadow that would not have looked out of place in a gritty remake of "Sleepy Hollow."
This bodes well for me, I can just feel it.
I've also recently discovered my parents' reaction to my planned trip, which can be nicely summed up by the word "aghast." They're staunchly against it, to the point where I started feeling like a 9-year-old being told that he isn't, in fact, a space alien with superpowers.
I've tried to explain that their particular mode of travel is anathema to me. They're very much of the stereotypical (older) Asian tourist mold: package tours, stuffed with bespectacled Baby Boomers wearing zip-off shorts and fanny packs, riding air-conditioned buses to major tourist attractions where they'll stay for exactly 45 minutes before piling on for a ride to the next spot on the itinerary.
I compared this to my Europe trip oh-so-many years ago with Fish, where I had a blast just walking randomly around London, stumbled upon the changing of the guard, and unsuccessfully tried to get the gate cop at the palace to have his picture taken whilst beating me with an umbrella.
Their reaction just became slightly tinged by bafflement; I suppose you could call them "aghaffled," or maybe "baffleghasted." I kind of like that, actually.
The upshot of the situation is, I'm just going to have to avoid talking about the trip so much with them, and I'll have to try to find some way of reassuring them while I'm off the grid. One suggestion they had (they actually cast it as a minimum necessity, once I mentioned it as a possibility) was to take the grid with me, but I'm not the biggest fan of that idea.
At any rate, add that to the list of things I have yet to take care of.
Oh yeah, and my taxes. Remind me again why I have to pay those? Can't I just apply to Congress for some free money instead? Where's my million dollar bonus financed by nonexistent tax funds? And apparently if I ignore my tax payments, I'm a shoe-in for a Cabinet appointment.
I guess that's a different post altogether. I can tell because my "self-righteous fury" meter is beeping.