The Downside of Traveling

I love to travel and am excited that Doug and I are able to go to Florida together this week.  I know that I will thoroughly enjoy the Epcot Flower & Garden Festival and can’t wait to see Ocala as well.  It has been quite some time since we have gone anywhere except for a few trips to Bloomington.  As excited as I am to get away, there are some parts of traveling that I dread.

The first negative to traveling is getting the house in order before we leave.  I spent this week picking up, organizing and cleaning.  I could have left it for  when I returned, but there will be enough to do when I get back without the extra burden of cleaning the house.  The second downside to traveling is packing.  It seems to take three times the amount of planning as unpacking does.  In the past we always had a travel bag ready since we were frequently on the go.  Since traveling hasn’t been a priority this past year and toiletries were in short supply for awhile, I hadn’t kept the bag stocked.  Thus, this trip included a Walmart before I could finish packing.  

The first two “negatives” are really just more of a nuisance and will be well worth it once we arrive at our destination.  The absolute wort part of traveling for me is flying.  I used to have no issues with being on an airplane.  We traveled to Florida yearly when I was a child and I actually enjoyed it.  My parents always bought me an invisible ink book to complete on the flight I knew at the end that I would get to see my grandparents.  A bad incident with turbulence in my early twenties changed my attitude toward flying.  It was the scariest and longest flight that I had ever had to endure.  

Since that time period I have completely dreaded flying.  No matter what I do, I can’t relax and nothing reduces my anxiety level.  I realize that it is an irrational fear and have done a lot better with it in the past few years.  The fifteen month drought from traveling, however, has gotten me out of the habit of flying and I am back to being extremely anxious just thinking about it.  I know that I have to get over it or otherwise we will be stuck at home forever.  Thus, I will use my energy to pray for an easy, safe flight tomorrow.  That will go a long way toward returning our life to the one before the pandemic drastically changed the Heinisch family travel journeys.