I'm off to Ontario this Saturday

I'm with you, Mame. I love traveling, but I consider the actual flying or driving a necessary evil.

I love getting away, though. I find it stressful...in a good way. It's invigorating to change the normal routine, and good mental stimulation to adapt to new places. Besides, I just love seeing different geography and experiencing different cultures.

When the time comes to go home, I am almost never ready to return. It's not that I don't like my home. It's just...well, I get to the airport and I see all the different destinations, and I can't help thinking, "Here I am, ready to go with my bags already packed, and I could get on any of these planes. WHY am I going home? I've already been there!"

It took me years to figure out why I always have this reaction.

When I was growing up, my father was self-employed and my mother stayed at home with us kids. So we were able to take about a month out of each summer to travel around the U.S...even made parts of Canada. There were five of us, usually in a travel trailer, driving thousands of miles. By the end of about Week 3 of being crammed together all day every day, we were getting on each other's nerves something awful, and we couldn't wait to get home so we could retreat to our own rooms and close the doors!

I haven't been gone from home for three straight weeks since I was a teenager. I was programmed to start getting homesick after three weeks, so now I'm simply never gone long enough to get homesick.

Retirement is coming up in a few years, and we hope to do some serious traveling then. It will be interesting to see if I get homesick after being gone three weeks or more.

How long does it usually take for YOU to get homesick?

Mame, I'm wishing you a very good trip. Lots of fun. Lots of R&R. Lots of catching up.

I used to love to travel--until I started traveling for business. Then it lost some of its charm. I got to visit some wonderful places. But most of the time I had to go somewhere I didn't want to go and spend time with people I didn't want to be with.

Travel lost its charm for me.

One of my favorite vacations was the time I took off in Noo Yawk. I was a tourist. Loved it.

Another favorite vacation was when I went sailing off the coast of Maine on a three-masted schooner.

No matter where I was and how much I enjoyed being away, I always loved coming home. Big sigh to be in my own surroundings with my own stuff.

Hello you two lovelies... Sorry it's been so long - I had no WIFI on the trip!

I had similar experiences as you, Eva, with the 7 kids in a car (ours was a hearse with curtains, station wagon or van) travelling all over USA and Canada full time before we went to school, and then all during the summers for several more years. I hate driving, or hated it, not so much now, but can't stand to be cooped up for long. With flying, I just have to readjust my mindset before I get to the airport and I'm good to go.

Roberta, Alex feels the same as you - he travels for work much of the year so when he has time off he wants to spend it at home.

Me, I'm always looking for the next trip - new things to see and eat... different architecture, people, music... love it all.

I spent the week with my daughter and her two girls at the cottage. Joeblow and her hubby came over the night we got there and brought us a cabin-welcome gift (drinkable, heh heh), and a few days later they came and took us out in their boat to a sandbar where the little ones could splash around. A couple of days later they came for dinner, and stayed much of the evening laughing and talking. They are fantastic folk.

We would drive to a town or feature (Lane Pioneer village, for example) and spend the morning roaming around, eating ice cream, visiting libraries and markets, then back to our camp or to Sandy Point for an afternoon of swimming and splashing with oodles of kiddies. Barbecue some dinner, open some wine... gab with my daughter once the little ones were down. Great way to spend the days.

The next Saturday, my daughter took her leave and I went to Joeblow and Larry's. Lovely weather, lots of boating, tons of scrabble and card games, reading, reading, reading, and great food. Really, really relaxing, drifty kind of down time, no agendas, no worries, no pressures. It was perfect.

I got back last night and was up at 4:30 as usual and cleaned out my suitcase, did laundry, picked up one of my dogs, went shopping, did some garden-picking, and just had lunch with Shelley (from Joe Nation and Shelley) and another friend.

Now I'm going to finish the book they lent me and chill out

As to when I get homesick - it really all depends on the trip.

Good to see y'all.

Sounds like a wonderful sequence of good relaxing times, Mame. Family, JoeBlow and L, Shelley and JoeN. Fast brains galore in great places, including home.

Me, I traveled with my parents a lot as a child. Starting as a baby, from the LA valley to Dayton, Ohio; from Dayton to Oklahoma City to visit my aunt and uncle (the one who churned peach ice cream on the porch, and early memory for me); back to Dayton. Back to Los Angeles where I went to half of kindergarten, the rest of that school year we were in Washington, DC (Arlington, actually) and I skipped school. Back to LA for first and second grade. Then we moved to New York City for a year, during which we went to Boston once; then new job, Dad, in Chicago for five years, with trips in those years to LA by car or train or plane back and forth at least three times, maybe four. Then we moved to Los Angeles for good (or ill, as happened), and two more big trips - me going with a crew with my father in a station wagon filming ranches and stockyards for three weeks for an industrial picture. Then just after college I drove with my father back to Dayton so he could do some research at Wright Field, and I flew back to LA.

I've probably forgotten something but you get the gist. I still love the music of the road, the sound of the car moving on pavement, the scenery, the landscapes, the cities, the stops for food - that was probably how I got so restaurant-happy. I also liked cabins (remember those?) and I remember my first motel - it was in Fort Wayne, Indiana and called something like the Travel Inn. Oops, that was on a drive back to Chicago from a month or two in Dayton when I was twelve... after which my mother was stung in the back of the car by a hornet that came in the window and went into anaphylactic shock. Scary, but my dad got her to a hospital and a shot of what I remember as ACTH.

I loved airplanes (the stewardess gave me a wing pin on my very first airplane trip). I loved trains more (cocoa in silver pot) and roomettes. I've since loved driving myself, though not so much city driving.

Good family times, at least in my mind.

So your kind of trip, Mame, sounds really good to me.

Glad you're home, and even happier that you had such a grand time!

You usually get up at 4:30am??? Whoa.....