I fantasize about travel

This is me, turned inside out, bits and pieces rubbed raw. This is me, tired at night, exhausted from the day, Husband challenging me to finish six (six!) lessons of the dozen I have due by November fifteenth for my distance learning British Literature course (I've had since February to get started, so there is no one to blame except your little moronic blogger here). Anxiety has a taste, you know. It has a physical shape, a way of being, and it is me, huddled beneath an orange-and-charcoal blanket my sister gave me as a wedding gift; it is me, watching old episodes of The West Wing because I can't go upstairs and read (I'll fall asleep and napping is bad and it's really bad when your husband is irked and says, "I'm concerned about how much you're sleeping") but I can't get my brain to function much beyond simple plots on the sofa. The dogs are doing drive-by lickings, which are alternately adorable and obnoxious, and Gatsby, the cat, is rubbing his body against the golden retriever and meowling because he wants in on the action too. Outside, the leaves are vibrant, so beautiful, so bright, and I want to love them, but I cannot because all I can think about is the endless cycle of these days: each school day, waking up before the sun, the stumbling about morning routine, the way I am no longer so late any more, planning lessons in the shower, drowning in grading, distracted by reading newly discovered blogs, and this: fantasizing about travel.

I asked Husband the question over burritos the other night: If you had unlimited funding and two weeks of vacation (I amended it to, OK, three, and the extra week is travel time, because we decided to bring the dogs with us after all and take the train), where would you go? He is a poor sport with these kinds of questions because indeed, he cannot afford to go anywhere (post-honeymoon and post-wedding debt, oh yes) and he cannot take three weeks off of work. I don't think he realizes that you can actually take the journey in your head, and it's half as fun--more fun than peering out the window at the drizzle in a town you've seen on repeat for too many days in a row. I said we should go back to Alaska, we could pick one city (Sitka, perhaps) and get a cabin. He could throw the dogs in a lake, I could write on an old fashioned typewriter (a master manuscript, of course, the one that has a true chance of being published), and we could sleep underneath thick handsewn quilts, no television, just books, and the sound of a crackling fire.

We're going to Milwaukee in a few weeks for a dear friend's wedding. I suppose this can be our Alaska, without the dogs, which is probably better anyway. I can write in the margins of my notebooks and we can drink whiskey to replace the fire.

And you. Where would you go if you had two weeks of vacation time and unlimited funds? (You can have one week of travel time too. So take a train or a boat. It's romantic.)