Travel agent
My spare time this week was spent playing travel agent - that’s why there have been no blog updates! Most every evening I was computering away, looking for cheap hotels and looking up things to do. I don’t like to post to my blog the details of trips I plan before I take them - never know what kind of burglars like to read blogs - so you’ll have to wait until after we take the trips to hear what I’ve been busy planning :P
I’ve decided that playing travel agent is definitely a hobby I enjoy. At first I thought that the fun was related to the planning bit - no comments from the peanut gallery on my planning fetish, please - but in thinking more about it, I think what I like is the orientation bit. You all know I have no sense of direction or spatial orientation whatsoever. (I mean, how many people can have 3 concussions within 3 weeks?!) When I plan trips, the thing I like doing is seeing how the city or area is laid out, on which roads or trains or subways we’ll travel, and visualize how we will move through the place(s) we are going to visit. I like to first look up where all the things are I want to go to, and then look for a hotel in the right area, and figure out how we will get from the hotel to the other things - can we walk? Will it have to be subway? What’s the most convenient place for hotel? When can we best go where? It’s all about orienting myself in the space.
Somehow, doing all this in advance really pays off when I actually take a trip, and makes the city come alive - because I know in my head where I am spatially in the area we’re visiting. When I don’t do this kind of orientation planning in advance - and Tim plays navigator on the spot - I more easily forget the things we’ve done or exactly where we’ve been - because I never understood how we got there or left there in the first place! I’m really looking forward to our trips, I don’t think I even need the maps anymore!