disenchanted

(and it don't feel so good.)

I've had a very long, pretty disheartening weekend. While it was lovely to spend it all inside while the Storm of the Century (tm every local weather station) raged outside, it was NOT refreshing to spend so much time with nitpicky foreign transportation logistics.

I don't know if it is a result of growing up in car culture, some result of privilege, or my own preference for urban environments over remote, but the concept of not being able to get from place a to place be is just...foreign to me. But it comes up A LOT when you are trying to navigate the fine points of place to place travel.

I spent hours and hours Saturday night online, trying to find reasonable flights to and from Egypt for my tour there. I went to every single budget carrier in Europe (note: there are many, many, many budget carriers in Europe) to get to and from at reasonable time and price, and essentially came up empty. The only one that had a good fare left at 2am from Cairo, when my tour ends at approximately 6pm in Dahab, on the Sinai peninsula. So, assuming nothing went awry, I could totally make the bus-flight-flight that it would take to get back to Europe, but I don't really feel like basing my entire schedule on the assumption that nothing could possibly go wrong crossing from Jordan to Egypt earlier that day. That is a recipe for a world of hurt. And all other flights either didn't leave for several days, or were upwards of US$400.

I gave up on Sunday, but was not in that much a better place trying to figure out where I want to go in Australia. The country is so damned big that it's a huge pain in the ass to go anywhere, and everything I do will involve some contortionist combinations of planes, buses, and a river of tears. I ended up completely scrapping my earlier plan of either Great Keppel Island or Whitsundays, and now I am going someplace totally different. But how did I arrive at that choice? Yup. Hours in front of my computer at every airline site I could come up with.

It was even more disheartening that I started the weekend with a dawning horror that I am going to go way over budget. I am terrible at spending money and I am a saver at heart, so this is really hard for me, to just be in spend-spend-spend mode with nothing coming in, but it's also next to impossible to accurately budget for 6 months on the road in such varying economies as Cambodia and Denmark. I will just have to have faith that all of my buffers will come through, and that everything will not cost as much as I fear.

One thing came of the weekend, and yes, this is me trying to silver lining a tiring weekend of planning:
I got so tired of planning where I may want to go and what I may want to do that I keep reverting to "Maybe I will just stay here that whole week..." instead of going other places. If I get this exhausted reading about these places, I can't imagine what it will be like to be going to them all. I will probably be very, very thankful for the "stay here a week" mentality come a few months in. So getting tired prepping could save my ass later.

Also, I am quite sure that when I do return home, I will never, ever, ever want to figure out how to get from where I am to where I want to be again.