Commencing post-trip re-adjustment phase. Re-acclimation in T-minus 10 minutes. Must clean house. Must get back on a schedule. Must remember that to make money, you can’t sit around in a café all day drinking espresso.
Damn you, real life!
It’s been about a week since our little family returned from our two-week journey to Europe. So amazing! We survived canceled flights, crazy airports, Dutch taxis, Dutch bikes, the French language, jet lag and maybe the toughest of all, the line to get a photo with the Mona Lisa.
But as with all great trips, they eventually come to an end and you return home. To real life and the world you left behind. Where there are routines to remember and houses to clean. Clothes to unpack and a host of other things that make you wonder, “Why did we ever come back? Why didn’t we just join a circus troupe and live the rest of our lives as traveling carnies?!?”
I’m certain I could be successful as an artisan cotton candy maker.
Anyway, it’s over and we’re all home trying to get back into the swing of things.
It’s not going well.
Our bodies have shaken off the jet leg and mostly responded to the 6-hour time change. Mostly. I can get up at 5 a.m. like I used to, but the minute it becomes 8 or 9 at night, something within me screams, “Hey, skunk weasel, it’s 2 in the morning. Go to sleep!” and I crash like I’ve been drugged by spies.
Wherever I am, I collapse. I could be holding a cup of scalding hot tea. I could be chased by maniacal guard dogs. I could be receiving a medal from the queen. It doesn’t matter. I just topple over and begin snoring like an asthmatic elephant.
The issue with dozing off so deeply that early in the night is that someone will inevitably walk over, poke me with a pencil and say, “Hey, dum-dum, time to go to bed.” This causes me to jerk straight up, totally disoriented and with no idea where I am. I also don’t know why someone is poking me with a pencil and calling me dum-dum, and if they are spies that I need to fight.
The first couple of nights I would sit on the edge of the sofa trying to make sense of where I was while my family tried to make sense of whether I was crazy, possessed by evil spirits and maybe in need of being stabbed with the pencil. Luckily, I would come to my senses and stumble off to bed.
There’s so much to do when you get back from a big trip. Unpacking on its own is an agonizing project. The laundry that must be extricated from suitcases. Most of it has become petrified from the pressure and heat of being stuffed in a plastic bag and crammed into a suitcase for two weeks. There are stories from really long trips of dirty clothes actually turning into diamonds from the heat and pressure.
Organized suitcases when you began are now like garbage dumps. The shampoo bottles that exploded from the pressure in the baggage hold. The fragile gifts now broken into millions of pieces because you thought ultra-thin tea cups could withstand ultra-careless baggage handlers. The fact that your “going home” packing style resembles that of a gangster who is making a dash from the law. “THROW IT ALL IN!!! WE’RE LATE FOR OUR FLIGHT!!!”
Then there’s getting your house back in order. The cleaning. The re-organizing. The remembering how your dog is a super-shedder and that she’s spent a lot of time at your house while you were gone, but nobody ever thought to teach her how to run the vacuum. Which explains why your house now looks like you have shag carpeting … on the walls! The Florida yard with the grass that has grown as tall as your waist, and likely now holds a family of jungle cats.
Most of all, there’s the loss of that relaxed feeling you reveled in while on vacation. Without a care in the world, aside from, “Where’s the next café where I can get espresso?” You pledge to find a way to hold onto that feeling. To bring it back to the real world. To adopt that tranquil, carefree attitude in everything you do. That glorious, relaxed feeling that felt like you were tip-toeing across clouds and dancing in Heaven.
It doesn’t take long for your dog-fur walls to do a number on that. How quickly that feeling seems to slip away like soapy rope.
Damn you, real life with your problems and your realities and your chores.
If only I had taken that circus troupe job and learned how to make artisan cotton candy. I bet most of that job just involved sitting around cafes drinking espresso and never having to worry about spies poking you with pencils. Now, that would be the life.