Anxiety

Does planning a trip stop you dead in your tracks?  Do you enjoy the thought of visiting people and places far from home but dread the work it takes to get there?  Do you like traveling but hate organizing it?  If so, welcome to the club.

It's been far too long between visits to our grandkids.  A wedding this summer complicated things.  Illness and surgeries added to the delay.  But FlapJilly has a short Fall Break next month followed the next weekend by Halloween; it is just too good an opportunity to pass up.

Getting it all together, though, has been an entirely different state of affairs.  I've had the idea for weeks.  It's taken me that long to figure it out.  I'm still not done.

There are a lot of moving pieces.  Friends to see, places to stay, transportation to be arranged.... it all became overwhelming.  I was stopped dead in my tracks, unable to do more than click through to the various airlines which can get me where I want to go, and sigh.

It's almost $900 to fly from Tucson to South Bend, with a change of planes in between.  We could drive to Mesa and fly Allegiant, but their twice a week flights don't make sense for the trip we want to take, even though the price is right and we could stay with JannyLou and Fast Eddie in their new digs close to the airport.  I love my grandkids, but $2000 is a lot of money, even with our still-restricted-by-COVID lifestyle curtailing most of our spending on fun.

Flying into O'Hare is half the price.  It's just far from where we want to be.  Rent a car?  Take public transportation?  Call a friend?  Obviously, I opted for the latter.  She was delighted to hear from me and thrilled to drive us anywhere we wanted to go, even a road trip to Indiana.  One problem solved.

FlapJilly has Friday and Monday off; her grandparents will take excellent care of her.  Giblet can miss a couple of days of pre-school; we'll keep him home and entertain him once his sister has returned to 3rd grade.  That leaves two un-filled days.  There's not much to amuse us in northern Indiana; we've been to the Studebaker Museum and Notre Dame and the South Bend Art Museum.  There's not much left to see.  It was these empty days that stumped me in planning..... we want to be there for the two weekends but what to do with the time in between?

We have friends with a house on Lake Michigan, but they will just be returning from a cruise and hosting guests might be a challenge.  I tossed and turned and mulled and considered and got nowhere.  I decided to ignore those two days and move to obsessing about the end of the trip, after Halloween on Monday.  I'm lucky to have friends who will always say YES when we want to visit; Seret and Mr. DreamyCakes will feed us and put us up and take us to the airport after we spend a day remembering why we love them so much.

So, now I wait for American Airlines to return my call.  Apparently, we each have a trip credit.  I don't remember which trip was cancelled during Pandemica, but there's documentation so it must have happened.  In order to use those credits, though, I have to speak to a human.  The robot who took my call offered the opportunity to hang up and have a real person call me back within 1 hour and 6 minutes and 1 hour and 30 minutes.

I've taken the interregnum to type this screed.  My stomach is in knots - for no reason.  My head is pounding - for no reason.  I'm perspiring.  I keep getting up and walking around and coming back to type.  

I will be so glad when the planning is over and I can just go.  There are times when being a grown up is just no fun at all.  Ridiculous, I know.  Foolish and silly and a total waste of emotional energy and yet, here I am, sweaty palms and fingers slipping off the keyboard.

I may just go and look at pricing private jets.