Full Stop

Today is my quiet day.

Dave is off on a one-day trekking tour where he is going to go white-water rafting with baby elephants in a hill-tribe village...or something. But me? I'm exhausted. I paid for the tour but then decided not to go. Instead, I'm resting in the hotel. So far, I've had breakfast and surfed the net for an hour. Later, there may be some reading and maybe a coffee in the tiny bakery down the street from the hotel. Maybe I'll walk up to the temple whose golden spire lights up our hotel room every morning when the first light of dawn hits it. Maybe I'll take a nap.

I'm just tired. In the past two weeks, I've moved everything I own--twice. First I moved from my apartment in Higashi-Mukojima to a hotel in Ningyocho. From Ningyocho, I left Tokyo with two suitcases, all that I'm taking out of Japan. (The students were shocked when I told them that I arrived with two suitcases and I was leaving with two suitcases.) Those two enormous suitcases are now in storage in Narita Airport in Japan, to the tune of twenty-thousand yen for the ten days Dave and I are in Bangkok...From Japan, Dave and I came to Bangkok. The six-hour flight seemed like a short nap after the seventeen hour travel days between the US and Japan. From Bangkok to Ayutthaya, back to Bangkok, then to Chiang Mai...

Albuquerque is the final stop on this leg of the journey, but already I'm thinking of what comes after Albuquerque...

It's not that I've been bitten by the travel bug. At heart, I'm a homebody. I was telling Judi that if I stand still for thirty seconds that I start to put down roots. Her sensible advice was to take an axe to own taproot.

Do they sell travel-sized axes?