SJ Rozan

(If you missed Part I, it’s yesterday’s post.)

Well, I’m packed.  If I don’t have it it’s not coming.  Since I’m not leaving for Mongolia until Monday this may seem extraordinarily early, and for me, believe me, it is.  Though my mother always packed days before she was ready to go, in case something she’d been planning to take was found to need washing or mending.  Me, I usually pack the night before, or, in the case of an afternoon departure, the morning of.  But tomorrow morning I’m going to the Rancho for the weekend, and I’m leaving Monday morning for the airport.  So effectively this is the day before, and since I’ll be at a book club gig tonight (folks who read GHOST HERO and were kind enough to invite me to the discussion) this is about as late as I can push it.

Also unusually for me, I’m checking a suitcase and taking a backpack plus a small bag.  I never check, always manage with a backpack and a 19″.  Guilty with an explanation: I’m taking some kid’s picture books as a gift for the guide’s little girl, and they were just one toke over the line for the suitcase.  Also, I intend to leave my travelin’ clothes behind in Ulaan Bataar so, three weeks later when we get back there and I need to rush to make my plane for the loooong trip home, I’ll have something clean to wear.  Now I have a bag to leave them in.

I also defrosted the freezer this morning.  Because it just COULDN’T WAIT until I got back, could it?

Packing for Mongolia, for which I leave on Monday.  Travel anxiety has begun to set in.  Am I taking too much, am I not taking enough, am I taking all the wrong things, I don’t have enough clothes for hot/cold/rainy/dry situations, do I have enough shampoo/vitamins/dramamine…

And of course what it’s really all about is, I’m going to the OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD FOR PETE’S SAKE!  And it’s not even really about that, either.  We’ve talked about this before on this blog and some of you were good enough to share your own  travel anxieties.  It’s about, I’m stepping so far outside my comfort zone I can’t even see it from here.  The packing madness, the one more shirt, the summer socks and winter socks, the extra moisturizer just in case — it’s all about taking my comfort zone with me.

I don’t do this any more when I go to Europe, though I used to, or when I travel in the US.  I’m famous for how lightly I pack.  Objectively, what I’m packing for Mongolia is pretty light, too, for, um, Mongolia.  But even going to Boston, I get this same exiled feeling, which is at the heart of the matter.  What do you MEAN I can’t stay here?  Right smack 100% in the middle of my comfort zone?  Where I know how things happen, how they work.  I have to LEAVE?  Whose idea was this?

Oh.

More on this later — excuse me now, I have to go make another list.

(I’ll finish the quote in the title in my Sunday night post before I leave.)