A note from Down Under
In Australia, at my parent’s house. Finally, more than a week after landing, this trip is starting to make sense. Prior to now there was just being squished into my seat on a full plane next to scruffy teen headed to Thailand for a surfing holiday who clearly relished my son’s wiggling and screaming for most of the 1.5 hour flight (almost as much as he relished the fact that during the five minutes when Dominic actually got quiet – 20 minutes before landing and right after they put the fasten seatbelt sign on – Baby Ratbag deposited a giant poo in his diaper). And then there was...
Read MoreLove At The Speed Of Email on sale!
I was going to write all these travel-themed posts this week – pithy updates on our three flights to get to Australia, an excerpt from the book, maybe some lessons-learned for parents traveling solo with a baby. But. This is thetime in the last four days I’ve managed to open my laptop. Dominic has a cold and is refusing to eat or drink much or sleep alone (or, for that matter, sleep for more than half an hour at a time, day or night). Right now he’s in the guest bedroom of our long-suffering hosts down here in Canberra. My mother is rocking him and offering him juice. He is wailing. I...
Read MoreOn the road again … 10 great quotes about travel
Apparently, the word travel has a common origin with the word travail. During the era when travel was uncomfortable and often dangerous, the French word trepaliare (torture) spawned the word travailler (to put oneself to pain or trouble). English borrowed the word as travail, meaning painful or laborious effort. From that root grew the word travel, which signified a wearisome journey. So there you go. Travel. Travail. Torture. Mike will be gone from Luang Prabang for most of the next three weeks. So will Dominic and I. The combined lure of spending time with family, seeing some doctors, and...
Read MoreGive me an “X”
We arrived back in Laos yesterday with our sore throats and running noses and 103 kilos of luggage (no, not making that up, that is actually how much we checked in and isn’t counting our four carry-ons which were loaded with children’s books) to find lots of hot sunshine to be had but not a great deal of electricity. As in, none. Mike hopped on his bicycle and went to do things like order yogurt and bread and buy fruit. There was no way I was braving the furnace that was upstairs to start unpacking suitcases, so I sat on the tile floor and watched sweaty snotty baby pull toys out of a...
Read More“This is completely my fault” and other things I’ve said this morning
I drifted off close to midnight last night and woke up in a panic at 3:45AM, remembering that I had not informed the taxi that was picking me up for the airport at 4:30 that I needed a car seat for Dominic. I spent at least three minutes frantically trying to figure out how I was going to rectify this mistake, before remembering that Dominic was in Washington DC and would not be in this taxi with me. All that flustered worry, wasted, when what I should have been worrying about was the fact that I’d booked my return flights to Washington DC for Sunday April 29th instead of Sunday April 22nd....
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