Some Unbearable Lightness

I've spent the last several spring-break times with my kids traveling to interesting places as part of my larger project to make them into Interesting Adults. Like most long-term investments, it definitely looks like a ludicrous, ruinous waste of time and resources in the beginning. This is because it is. A point will arrive where you will question the validity of any of your assumptions about travel broadening the mind, especially when your 12 year old only seems to have picked up the ability to be disappointed by the lack of quality options in the embedded seat-back entertainment system on your transcontinental flight. It's tricky because the same types of experiences that can produce an Interesting Adult can also swing the other direction and stick you with a Colossal Entitled Douchebag. The secret to avoiding the latter over the former is... well, I guess I'll have to let you know. The oldest one is 17. Should be getting our first real results any day now.

After last year's trip to the UK,* I'd decided to take this year off. Leaving the hemisphere felt like a good enough sign-off for our epic and intermittent road show, especially since we're about to be down a man with the oldest one shoving off for college later this year. Plus, we'd kind of gone to all the good places. You can only gaze out an airplane window with complete indifference at Kansas so many times before you realize that, by process of elimination, you may to actually end up going there some day. Not worth the risk, frankly.

Circumstances, alas, are forcing me to travel. Without the kids. And last-minute, at annoyingly profound expense (relatively speaking). But it can't be helped. I spoke last week about the slow-moving luggage carousel of generations and, well, it chugs on at a pace of its own choosing, demanding your attention from time to time whether you are prepared to give it or not. So begrudgingly, dutifully, I go, to one of the worst non-California places in these Already Great United States. I don't really want to say where as I slag an entire state--nay, region--off for being held together only by nostalgia, rust and that yellow police-line murder-scene tape, but suffice it to say at least that it is NOT Kansas. So it's not all bad.

Sorry to be vague about the circumstances and such, but I do have a tendency, when things get real or in some way existential, to come over all poetical in these spaces, so I'm trying to keep all that in check. Suffice it to say that there's a better-than-outside chance that there will be no new post to warm the cockles of your... cockle-holding body part at the regular time next Thursday. I'll be in a hotel room probably, wishing I were here, with my kids asleep down the hall, trying to wrestle profundity out of the mundane in the form of elaborate metaphors, too many adjectives, and half-hearted dick jokes.

But you never know. I do have a smartphone I can tippy-tap thumb type into. Not sure, though. It seems like autocorrect these days is unnaturally aggressive in its insistence on helping me out. That plus my new-ish over-large iPhone 6S Plus is an awkward size for typing, so I spend most of my time correcting the corrections. Maybe I'll throw you a bone and post something non-text, like a photo. But I'll be in a hotel room alone in the dark. None of the options for photos in a situation like that are particularly savory.

---

*One year on, this happened on the bridge we crossed probably more than any other while we were there, going over the Thames from our hotel near Waterloo station into the crowded, jabbering swarm of fellow gawkers around the august and pointy sights of Westminster. It's something you're forced to consider going into the popular parts of major cities anymore, sadly. I certainly thought about it before we went over. And when we left, I knew we were lucky. These days there are few things I cherish more than the unremarkable.