Vacations can be filled with anxiety. I am old enough to remember when traveling was exciting and filled with wonder (not terror). Perhaps the young still have that wonder (I hope so) but all I know is that the older I get the more I hate to travel. What suitcase should I bring? What constitutes terrorist accessories at the airport? Do I have to bring my own food, pillow, blanket, entertainment and of course I cannot forget my anti-anxiety medication. Sometimes getting ready for a trip, no matter how short or how familiar the trip is longer than the trip itself. Forget about travel to an exotic land. Do I need shots? When was my last tetanus? Do I have all of the medication that my local Duane Reade pharmacy might carry – just in case? Here is a packing list I found that I do not use but maybe you will find it helpful.

Yet as much as I complain (and I do) I still manage to get myself to an airport about half a dozen times a year and usually have a great time despite my horror stories of past vacations that included a plague scare, a dengue fever alert, volcano eruptions, pre-military coups and the beginning of the Intifada. I am not one of those travelers who comes back from a trip and tells you that it was the best trip ever. I always remember the bad parts, but they do end up as funny stories, years later. One of my friends who travels more than a pilot says that the worst part of traveling is the travel.

So I am off for about a week. See you soon.

When Rome fell, vacations and the tourist trade went into a slump that lasted in Western Europe for a thousand years. The original Latin vacatio—an emptying, a suspension of normal activity, an absence of something—performs a small mystic flip when it encounters Pascal’s thought: “The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” But vacations, in a secular sense, have an ancient history. Inns, restaurants, baths and theaters turned up in the archaeological digs at Herculaneum and Pompeii. For just as long, vacationers have been subdivided into spiritual castes: the enthusiasts who live all the rest of the year waiting for their temporary release, like school children in early June; and the possibly larger tribe that comes home every year from its outings, hurls suitcases into closets and vows never to do it again.

Full text of article written in 1979 in Time Magazine by Lance Morrow can be read here.

- One of my favorite new sites that I recommend to all fellow travelers is seat guru. It informs you about every plane in the sky and about every seat, accessory, why you should sit in one seat and not another. It is a great site to visit before any trip.

- This site is dedicated to flight delays.

- Want an International calling code?

- And here is a great wake up video. Anyone with a cat can appreciate this one.