Beam me up

One thing people always say about retirement is they can travel more. In fact, we are hoping to travel later this year. This brings up a few issues.

It’s not that I don’t like to travel. I like to travel. Well, I like to see new places. Getting there is not always that much fun. The first time I went to Europe, I remember thinking “wow, just for 12 hours of being trapped in this amazingly noisy metal thing, I can arrive in a totally different country!!” Boggled my mind. Since then, I’ve lost a bit of the wonder of plane travel.  I do have the advantage of being short, however, which works in my favor on airplanes. 

Something that does not work in my favor is that I can’t really speak other languages. I mean, I can usually say “hi” and “thank you” and recognize the word for “chicken” on menus, but it once took me 10 minutes to get across the question of “where is the bathroom?” And that was in England! 

Don’t even get me started on when I thought I ordered a perfectly safe cheese sandwich only to be served head cheese. Why would that even be on a menu?!

On the plus side, I’m very easily entertained. I once sat in a cafe in Paris for an hour, just watching some guy unload a car carrier. Never did figure out where he was taking the cars. He had to park the carrier in a wide street near the opera house. That was pretty too, I guess. 

The problem with travel is, as I get older, my requirements for accommodations get more particular. I really prefer an en suite bathroom vs. going down the hall. I don’t want to switch planes a lot. I like eating in restaurants. I don’t want to try to sleep on a train in order to save a night’s hotel bill. In other words, I’m a lot pickier than I used to be about my comfort.  

All of this leads to the obvious occupation: inventing that transporter they have on Star Trek. So much easier to get from A to B. Slim chance of becoming evil due to scrambled molecules, but planes have their risks too.