Now that I’ve got my car all fixed up and my taxes paid, I can do the one “big” thing I planned to do this spring: take a road trip back to Louisiana to visit family, with a stop in Arkansas to hang out with a friend for a few days. My loose plans to do this became decidedly more concrete this weekend after conversations with both that friend and my mother, and I’ll be heading out Easter Saturday so that I can be back in Baton Rouge for Sunday.
For the first time in a long time, rather than feeling apprehensive about travel, I’m actually looking forward to it. That despite the fact that it’s a 13ish-hour drive from where I live to my mother’s house; Saturday’s gonna be a long day. But I’m not filled with the slowly growing feeling of worry and stress that usually accompanies any sort of travel that I do, and that’s exciting.
That’s not to say that I don’t have to make preparations. (Ugh. Double negatives. I’m going to leave that the way it is, but now I can see why grade school English was so down on the form.) I no longer have a work laptop, and I suspect I’ll want to check my email at least once or twice while I’m gone, so I ordered a cheap Chromebook last night; opinions on the device forthcoming once I take the trip. I don’t have a car charger for my phone either, which uses USB C. That was another late night Amazon order. I didn’t actually go to bed until almost 5am last night as I kept thinking of things I needed to do.
But it’s a good busy, not a bad one, and I find myself actually anxious to go rather than anxious about going. Maybe I’ll actually be able to do some semi-regular traveling now that I’m retired, if this turns out well. That’d be a pleasant surprise discovery, that I actually like tooling around in my car and visiting people and places at the (relatively) leisurely pace that unemployment affords. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I’m still finding out things about myself, this many years into my life, and yet here we are.
Now to figure out how many changes of clothes to bring…