Adventuretime!

Travel is fun.  And when I say fun I mean simultaneously the most miserable and most sublime experience one can have.  I just got back from doing travel.  In light of this, a travel-related post describing things that Make Me Happy (TM) and Make Me Less Happy:

Happy: Awesome hotel suites to yourself.  You can dance around in your towel, use all the shampoo, watch whatever stupid show you want on the telly (for me, Squidbillies), sleep in one bed and jump on the other, and fling your coat on random chairs.  Also, you can sing.  Quietly.

Less Happy: Insomnia.  Time changes, scary huge rooms, a nice helping of existential angst, bedclothes that smell unmistakeably hotel-y and too-fluffy pillows meant that I'm cruising on an average of 5 hours for the past three days.  Joy.

Happy: Really Cool Stuff: one of the problems about living in South-central Washington is the lack of cool stuff.  I mean, there's a lot of cool stuff in SCWA.  Wineries and cafes and the Columbia River and big dirt hills that always make me happy.  But to get the really tongue-numbing, piercing-shriek-inducing cool stuff, you have to get out a bit.  Mostly the Really Cool Stuff I gravitate towards when Travelling is museums.   Of course there's the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in DC, containing much taxidermy and strange rocks.  In Kansas City, though, of all places (that's Kansas City, Missouri, not Kansas City, Kansas) there's the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, which is wonderful and glorious and really, really well done.  It's got an Assyrian relief with cuneiform.  It's got Caravaggio, Monet, Manet, Renoir, Durer , and the remains of a medieval French cloister.  It's very cool.

Less Happy: Total overstimulation.  I have a very low threshold for excitement, and the combination of no sleep (see above), the physical stress of travel, the disruption of my routine, and even all the Really Cool Stuff that I get to see, but have to process very quickly, renders me adrift and frankly cranky.  Fortunately, I can ground myself rather quickly upon returning home.

Also, forgetting one's toothbrush.  Never fun. 

Happy: Transportation.  I love watching the view from a plane.  I love taking off and watching everything shrink.  You can get a whole different perspective on topography by seeing it from above.  Also it makes me want to write poetry.  Taxis, too, get love, when they're clean and the driver is friendly (and I find that most of them, in my experience, are.)

Less Happy: Transportation.  As fun as planes can be, they get really cold.  I hate cold.  Also it's pretty much impossible to be comfortable in them.  Plus, the dry air, the changes in pressure, the unexplained swoops and dips, and generally my own less-than-stable mental state make me feel achy, queasy, and overall weird after about an hour.  Ugh.  Planes.

Taxis are also not pleasing when they are grimy, smell funny, and get flat tires at 3 AM.  No, not very nice at all.

These, then, are my reflections on travel, and what it can do to/for one.