Weary...

How many years does air travel take off a person's life?

This sad self-portrait comes to you from late at night in a hotel room in Salt Lake City. It’s actually the second room of the night - the first one had a flood emanating from the general region of the mini fridge and a non-functional fireplace… this room was like an ice box - I presume because it was unbooked and empty the heat had been turned off. (Heat is now on… I will be fine.)

Anyway, my unexpected layover in Salt Lake City was courtesy of the airline that had oversold the flight from Salt Lake to Calgary and then bribed a few of us with cash cards, hotel rooms, and meal vouchers if we’d agree to give up our seats.

Unfortunately, I’m too bagged to draw much of anything… I’ve just finished the weekly post, prompts, and recording inside the Writers on Fire group and that has pretty much done me in.

I know that air travel isn’t quite as perilous and exhausting as, say, hopping on a wagon train and trundling across a couple of thousand miles of rough terrain while birthing a baby on a pile of burlap sacks in the covered wagon (be glad I don’t have the strength to draw that), but I do wonder if there’s some as-yet-uncalibrated cost to leaving home in a snowstorm and arriving in a heat wave at the other end of the continent… or skipping back and forth across time zones… or fretting that you’ve forgotten an oversize tube of toothpaste in your carry-on bag or that the burly security line dude won’t believe it’s your artificial hip setting off shrieking alarms, or unpacking and thinking you are settled in one hotel room only to have to pack up again and trundle upstairs and down another hallway to a new room after running back and forth across a couple of airports not knowing whether you’ll be home again as planned (depending on how many of the bonus passengers actually showed up for the flight). Do you even remember where that sentence started and what I was wondering? Me either.

Perhaps those who travel a lot for work develop some kind of immunity - or maybe they just live shorter lives.

As for me - I’m tapping out. I’m not sure whether to be happy about it or not, but my rebooked flight has me back in Canada and catching a shuttle bus back to the mountains that happens to arrive ten minutes before my scheduled tooth extraction tomorrow. Oh. Joy.

Don’t expect much/anything from me when I finally get home.

Ciao for niao!