If you've been reading this blog for awhile you know I've talked about this before. I love to travel and do a lot of it, but always, a few days before a trip, starts that feeling: I don't want to go. It manifests as: why am I doing this, it's a bad time for me to leave, I have so much to do, my back hurts, my garden is so beautiful and I won't see it, I'll miss my nephew's birthday... whatever whatever whatever, but it's not really any of that. It's a feeling of being exiled, as though I weren't leaving, I were being kicked out. I don't know if everyone feels this, but I've been astonished over the years to find that the most enthusiastic and inveterate travelers I know -- people like me who'd go anywhere you gave them a ticket to -- all do.

I'm going to Italy today, leaving home in about an hour, and I'm feeling it now. Thinking, What am I DOING? What will happen, of course, and I take this on faith because it always does, is that I'll be fine as soon as I get through security at the airport and am sitting around (hopelessly early as always) waiting to board. By the time the plane takes off, I'll be excited again, as I was when I made this plan.

So I leave you with the words of Peter Fleming, an enthusiatic and inveterate traveler, who, on a trip through western China in 1935, wrote: "He who starts on a ride of two or three thousand miles may experience, at the moment of departure, a variety of emotions. He may feel excited, sentimental, anxious, carefree, heroic, roistering, picaresque, introspective, or practically anything else; but above all he must and will feel a fool."