Riiight. Savvy traveler I am not-- I’ve had a crash course in getting ready for an overseas tour: shit has gone wrong and gotten turned around in ways I couldn’t have even imagined getting ready for this trip. Here’s how NOT to prepare for a two week trip book-ended by nineteen-hour flights:
- Renew your passport via Expedited Service two months before you leave. Feel very proud of your accomplishment in remembering this.
- Realize that your manager needs your passport tomorrow two days after putting it in the mail to the Passport Authority. Shit.
- Receive passport in mail, immediately drop it in the mail to your manager without making a copy in case of emergencies to leave with your husband. Shit.
- Realize that you don’t have a carry-on for all your various expensive medications and paraphernalia. (My spell check just told me that, yes, that is indeed how to spell that word.) Shit. Ask your Mother for one for Christmas. Even though you’re now almost thirty years old, apparently your parents are still Santa Claus.
- Search for another pair of pants that your husband bought you for Christmas (you’d fight anybody who tried to take them away from you) that fold up into a sandwich bag and feel like a hug. Discover that apparently they have fallen into the Gap they came from and are no longer available in any size but extra small. Shit.
- Plan out all the medications you need for the trip. Forget to order them. Order them the week before the trip and pay hefty FedEx fees for your stupidity.
- Think about whether to take your laptop. Think better of it and determine you can check email via your PSP, which is lighter and smaller and you can use to play Death Junior.
- Fool around with the PSP and decide that entering text via a joystick kind of sucks. Decide to take laptop.
- Buy expensive airline adapter for laptop then determine that your flights will have no outlets for it as you are neither cool nor rich enough to afford First or Business class.
- Make a list of everything you need to pack. Have an Oh Shit moment at the length of your carry-on list and decide not to take laptop. Who needs to be sane on a thirteen hour flight anyway when you can talk to the crazy smelly people in your group.
- Forget about your packing list and update your blog.
- Go get your hair cut by the lady who is taking over for your usual hairdresser. Discover the next morning that she is one of those hairstylists—it looked great when you left the salon but you will probably never be able to replicate the look yourself without your blowdryer.
- Burn out blowdryer trying to replicate new haircut. Give up and buy a travel dryer for your trip.
- Buy various adapters and transformers for your electronics, never mind that you have no idea which ones you’re bringing yet.
- Do a trial-run of packing you carry-on and find out all those things on the list are, in fact, really small and you still have room for your laptop. Score!
- Leave your unopened suitcase lying around if you have a cat. He will decide it’s a litter box and take the appropriate action. That smell never comes out. Chuck the suitcase.
- Wait until two nights before you leave to check out your husband’s suitcase. The wheel will fall off when you take it out of the closet and roll under the couch, and you will have a shit-fit, because now you have no viable suitcases in the house.
- Wait until the night before you leave to try and find a new suitcase. Invariably the one you want will be discontinued and sold out and you’ll have to settle for a navy blue off-brand, which even though it’s cheap, is still navy blue and off-brand.
- While rushing to pack, forget to charge your cell phone. Shit.
- While doing said packing, forget to pack cell phone charger. Shit.
- After you’ve packed it, realize all of your flight information is on your laptop. Unpack it and print your boarding pass. Repack it, but forget to turn it off so it dies a slow hibernation death while you sleep.
- Get up and decide not to take a shower, you’ll just do it when you get to your sunny humid destination.
- Notice when you get to the airport that you packed your sweater but are wearing your heavy coat. Remedy the situation in the freezing cold from the trunk of your husband’s car at the departure curb.
- Discover after a smooth check-in and security check that the place where you’re going has been storm-struck. Call your friend to make sure he still has a house.
- Get on your flight and immediately place the carry-on with all of your entertainment items in an overhead bin above a very belligerent looking fat man in the row behind you. Shit.
- Discover that you could have bought one of your gadgets cheaper in the SkyMall magazine, meaning you really got ripped off.
- Arrive at your destination and forget to call your spouse to tell him you got there safely. Shit. Ditto for your mother. (Yes. Thirty. You still have to call your mother when you arrive.)
- Discover upon trying to call your husband that you have a dead cell phone and no charger. Shit.
- Try to charge cell phone with newfangled airline charger thingamabob. Discover that your service provider is a pack of bastards that will only let you use “approved charging devices”. Shit.
- Give up, buy expensive new cell phone charger while waiting in the airport for the second leg of your trip. Search for any available plug in the terminal, then sit on the cold tile floor next to the charging tram car and finally talk to your husband.
