K wins. We both lose.
Some couples fight about sex or finances. K and I always fight about vacations. As I mentioned, he doesn't go gently into that perfectly good airport. I don't have a problem with homebodyism, especially in men, and especially when it accompanies an interest in the botanic and culinary arts. But K...I might have misspoken in calling it agoraphobia. It's not, exactly, since he has no problems being out and about within his turf. Try to get him outside the city, though, and he turns into a veritable tennis-ball practice machine of excuses. I'm left running up and down the court, batting them away, and it's both exhausting and frustrating: my interest is in switching off the machine, not returning every lob, especially as I know another damn ball is two seconds behind.
I'd written, the other day, "we break up two or three times, and then we go on the trip and everything's fine."
Here's a puzzler: What happens if we never go on the trip?
I genuinely don't have the answer to that one. It's never happened before. Because we have a bad track record with vacations, I started planning this one weeks ago, soliciting K's input at every juncture. It was hard work: using a half-dozen guidebooks, an array of websites, train schedules, bus schedules, and all the constraints that are India (weather, closures, etc), I spent a solid thirty hours of my limited after-work time chasing down dead ends, backtracking, and finally coming up with a detailed itinerary that maximized exploration and tried to minimize anticipated hassle.
K has no patience for working out the details of these things and is of no assistance. Which is fine: when we were in London, I hypothesized that K's travel difficulties were due to a lack of buy-in with the process, and, on three separate occasions, let him make all the arrangements for trips we'd both agreed we wanted to do, without so much as a glance over his shoulder. For one, we ended up arguing the night before and not even using the tickets. For both others, we ended up without a hotel (in one case, because K gave the hotelier an incorrect home phone number) and, without a single other hotel vacancy in the city, had to abruptly end our trip.
I sweat the details by temperament, and don't mind playing travel agent. In India, though, final train and plane bookings often have to be done in person, which is not something my work hours let me do. All this week, I've been asking K to stop by the train station and airline office. He's had a cold, so I haven't pushed it. On Thursday, I left for Aurangabad at 5:45 AM. I had a full day of talks and meetings, and was scheduled to return at 7 PM. The monsoon, of course, finally hit Mumbai as we were taxiing down the runway. Literally: the engines revved up, we started speeding up...and then slowed, and stopped. We sat in the middle of the runway for close to an hour without any information, then were eventually taken back to the terminal. I made it home, finally, after midnight on Friday morning, after a harrowing ride through thunderstorms in a small prop plane. Right before going to bed -- having prudently loaded up my backpack for this vacation the night before the A'bad trip -- I asked K (his cold now reduced to a case of the sniffles) about our tickets.
He hadn't gotten them.
I'll be the first to admit that the trip I'd planned and consulted K on every decision point wasn't perfect. Neither of us had arrived in India with the burning desire to go to Uttaranchal. But we'd discussed -- and discussed -- the immovable constraints we faced, and -- I thought -- finally decided that the idea of going off the tourist trail was exciting.
For me, more important than the place, was just getting away. I've had only one short vacation this year, a few days in Bangkok. That trip, too, was something I'd carefully planned, wanting both to show K everything I loved about Bangkok as well as connect up with a friend in Chiang Mai. The week before departure, K complained of a toothache and announced he couldn't go. I pointed out that Bangkok has the best dental facilities in developing-world Asia. The trip was off, then on, then off, right up until the morning of the day we left. K did nothing but vacillate, while I kept having to cancel and reconfirm our hotels, rearrange my work schedule, and keep making changes with my friend. I was exhausted and furious when we left, and told K in no uncertain terms that I would not travel like that again in the future. Once there, incidentally, we had a fabulous time, I met up with my friend, and K got excellent dental work done at extremely reasonable prices.
The reason we were shooting for as monsoon-dubious a time as late June is because my boss is about to leave post, and I'm not going to have another opportunity to take time off for the foreseeable future. I've got use-or-lose leave that's accumulated (which, I guess, now I'll lose), and I'm looking at an incredibly hectic and stressful next few months, as I try to run our division on my own. I'm already going into it feeling burned-out (given that I worked a 20-hour day on Thursday, I'm a little nervous about what "longer hours" could possibly mean), and time away would have meant so, so very much.
K, of course, will get his vacation – he'd been planning to visit family in the US, and those (extremely infrequent) trips that he initiates somehow seem to always get done. But we're going to need to have a very serious discussion about whether he should be buying a round-trip or a one-way ticket.
I'd written, the other day, "we break up two or three times, and then we go on the trip and everything's fine."
Here's a puzzler: What happens if we never go on the trip?
I genuinely don't have the answer to that one. It's never happened before. Because we have a bad track record with vacations, I started planning this one weeks ago, soliciting K's input at every juncture. It was hard work: using a half-dozen guidebooks, an array of websites, train schedules, bus schedules, and all the constraints that are India (weather, closures, etc), I spent a solid thirty hours of my limited after-work time chasing down dead ends, backtracking, and finally coming up with a detailed itinerary that maximized exploration and tried to minimize anticipated hassle.
K has no patience for working out the details of these things and is of no assistance. Which is fine: when we were in London, I hypothesized that K's travel difficulties were due to a lack of buy-in with the process, and, on three separate occasions, let him make all the arrangements for trips we'd both agreed we wanted to do, without so much as a glance over his shoulder. For one, we ended up arguing the night before and not even using the tickets. For both others, we ended up without a hotel (in one case, because K gave the hotelier an incorrect home phone number) and, without a single other hotel vacancy in the city, had to abruptly end our trip.
I sweat the details by temperament, and don't mind playing travel agent. In India, though, final train and plane bookings often have to be done in person, which is not something my work hours let me do. All this week, I've been asking K to stop by the train station and airline office. He's had a cold, so I haven't pushed it. On Thursday, I left for Aurangabad at 5:45 AM. I had a full day of talks and meetings, and was scheduled to return at 7 PM. The monsoon, of course, finally hit Mumbai as we were taxiing down the runway. Literally: the engines revved up, we started speeding up...and then slowed, and stopped. We sat in the middle of the runway for close to an hour without any information, then were eventually taken back to the terminal. I made it home, finally, after midnight on Friday morning, after a harrowing ride through thunderstorms in a small prop plane. Right before going to bed -- having prudently loaded up my backpack for this vacation the night before the A'bad trip -- I asked K (his cold now reduced to a case of the sniffles) about our tickets.
He hadn't gotten them.
I'll be the first to admit that the trip I'd planned and consulted K on every decision point wasn't perfect. Neither of us had arrived in India with the burning desire to go to Uttaranchal. But we'd discussed -- and discussed -- the immovable constraints we faced, and -- I thought -- finally decided that the idea of going off the tourist trail was exciting.
For me, more important than the place, was just getting away. I've had only one short vacation this year, a few days in Bangkok. That trip, too, was something I'd carefully planned, wanting both to show K everything I loved about Bangkok as well as connect up with a friend in Chiang Mai. The week before departure, K complained of a toothache and announced he couldn't go. I pointed out that Bangkok has the best dental facilities in developing-world Asia. The trip was off, then on, then off, right up until the morning of the day we left. K did nothing but vacillate, while I kept having to cancel and reconfirm our hotels, rearrange my work schedule, and keep making changes with my friend. I was exhausted and furious when we left, and told K in no uncertain terms that I would not travel like that again in the future. Once there, incidentally, we had a fabulous time, I met up with my friend, and K got excellent dental work done at extremely reasonable prices.
The reason we were shooting for as monsoon-dubious a time as late June is because my boss is about to leave post, and I'm not going to have another opportunity to take time off for the foreseeable future. I've got use-or-lose leave that's accumulated (which, I guess, now I'll lose), and I'm looking at an incredibly hectic and stressful next few months, as I try to run our division on my own. I'm already going into it feeling burned-out (given that I worked a 20-hour day on Thursday, I'm a little nervous about what "longer hours" could possibly mean), and time away would have meant so, so very much.
K, of course, will get his vacation – he'd been planning to visit family in the US, and those (extremely infrequent) trips that he initiates somehow seem to always get done. But we're going to need to have a very serious discussion about whether he should be buying a round-trip or a one-way ticket.
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