Yesterday, I flew down to the Caribbean to visit my family and take my daughter to visit her grandparents. With all love and due respect to my family, I HATE traveling. Specifically, flying. Now, going to new places (or old) and seeing new things (or familiar), that doesn’t bother me. It’s the GETTING THERE that bothers me. Flying, particularly flying internationally, involves several layers of hell for me:

1. Crowds of people who I don’t know. Crammed together, shoving, pushing, etc.
2. Those same people I don’t know shoved into a confined space along with me and me forced to share even closer space with them.
3. Being unable to get away from people to a place of my own; basically, having to deal with people whether I like to or not.

All of this grates on the introverted nature of my personality. My body language reads “Go away!” and “Leave me alone”. I find myself resentful of when strangers talk to me while I’m traveling, even when they are just trying to help. I find myself wanting to scream, “I have been flying since I was two weeks old. I know what the hell I am doing! I don’t need your help! Leave me alone!” I know that it’s unfair to them and so I put on a smile, say my polite thank-you’s, and try to escape as quickly as possible.

Now, traveling is great fun for people like my husband and my father, it gives them a whole new passel of people to meet and talk to, and those two can talk to ANYONE. I would rather let the earth swallow me up than approach strangers in the airport, truthfully, but they are fearless in striking up conversations and, it’s true, they tend to meet some very interesting people. In Ben’s case, he tends to find people, at the farthest reaches, who happen to be from just the next county over. It’s a little amazing.

On the whole, I’m glad that traveling is done for now. Have to do it again in ten days; I need to catch my breath.