Confession: I Love Everything About Travel

    Some of you will cringe and others will doubt my sanity, but just a few of the salty souls who understand will smile and nod.
    I love everything about travel. I adore the (obvious) flirt with adventure and discovery; I appreciate the way every day brings a new perspective from a different angle or location.
    The idea of arranging all of my belongings into compartments and packages and making them work is delicious and the kind of challenge that excites.
    Even the delays and mix-ups and wrong turns have an acquired cache, like the smell of your own baby's sweat.
    I love airplane food (gasp!). Not the plastic wrapped pretzels, but the bento-boxes of international flights and the tiny flatware with which you dive, elbows tucked, into lamb biryani or mini English roast dinner or a one dish breakfast casserole. I can justify that mid-day cocktail because it is truly 5:30 somewhere.
    Airports, train stations, subways are a microcosm of humanity complete with the good, bad and ugly. Arriving in a new place makes the entire world fresh and discoverable, makes even the next corner as unknown as the planet Mars.
    The destination matters less than the attitude by which you approach it, for me. Some of the best adventures have been rather close to home, and I've found many similarities to my own life hundreds of miles away.
    Sure, I love our cozy little house and the wilds of our back garden, but I'll never tire of the rush of airports and the languor of terminals, the unexpected sights and sounds and the pull of inertia.
    Annnddd... away we go!