The Night Before

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Vacations that involve going somewhere are not just physical journeys about how we get from Point A to Point B and back again. It might be the English literature major in me, but I do believe that all physical journeys are also mental journeys.

Do I feel prepared for this particular journey to Japan?--not yet, but I'm not sure if one ever is completely mentally and emotionally prepared to take a trip. I suppose in an ideal trip situation, the rest of our lives (work, chores) would all fall away and we could focus our sole attention on preparing our minds for our trip. I've never really found the rest of the world to fall away in this convenient manner. I'm just now trying to forget all the stress of trying to complete as much as I could at work before leaving for over a week.

As I mentioned to some of my coworkers, these sort of trips have never felt real to me until I'm in the airport, which I will be tomorrow morning two hours before 6:55 am. Note -- my original flight left PDX at 8:20 am, but a few months later the flights were changed. You can be as careful with flight selection as you can be within your budget, and there still might be changes you can never anticipate. Well, I need to get to bed considering I need to get up a 3:30 am tomorrow. I should have plenty of time at the LAX airport to write blog updates as I have a layover there for about five hours tomorrow.

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