A Ramble, and An Ode to my Frameo

I’ve spent the year playing leapfrog with that number—sometimes I’m a number of books ahead-of-pace, obviously sometimes the opposite. But we’re coming up on that time of year where even workdays are (largely) reading days, because nothing much is happening in the RV-park office. We’re paid to be “on deck,” but those days are close to 8 hours of solid reading, in the winter. Most vacationers have put up their rigs for the winter, so we might be checking in a traveler or two, but mostly the phone isn’t ringing, people aren’t arriving, and the only “happening” in the day is the arrival of mail, and people coming in to pick theirs up.

This morning I pulled out my bin of out-of-season (and out-of-SIZE) clothing, got out some sweaters and long-sleeved tops, and tried on some others that are summer weight, but had been relegated to the closet shelf because of fitting too tightly. As I wrote yesterday, I’m finally working at taking off the remainder of my excess weight—I literally did a happy-dance in front of the mirror when the third top in a row slipped over my head and settled into place without pulling tight across my middle. I don’t understand why the weight is coming off now, when I couldn’t get the scale to budge, a year ago. This time last year, I was spending as much as a couple hours a day on my treadmill, and I still could NOT get the scale to budge. I don’t know why this round is different, but I’m grateful! And determined to keep up the momentum. Twelve pounds down, another eighteen to go, to get out of the “overweight” category, at last. In the meantime, I added those three tops to my pile of things-to-pack for our Hawai’i trip in a few weeks.

My dad, who was an avid traveler, used to say there are three stages of enjoyment to any trip: the anticipation, the trip itself, and the remembering. I’m up to my eyebrows in anticipation right now. The more the weather here threatens to fog and snow, the more I grin at the thought of white beaches.

My husband doesn’t like countdowns, but as for the trip itself, I could not have designed a more compatible travel-buddy than Jon. We enjoy the same things, and we seem to “sync up” beautifully with regard to things like when we feel like doing something—including when we feel like resting & recharging.

One of the most draining things about traveling with someone less-compatible is the need to drag yourself along to things when you’re really needing that recharge. Traveling with my dad, for example, could be exhausting! He treated his guidebooks as if they were checklists that had to be completed before he left a place… Dad was also not a fan of spontaneity. You had to have a PLAN for your day—and you had to stick to it. Jon & I are more inclined to do things like drive along the coast and just pull over when we see a spot we like, and break out our snorkel gear and jump in!

What I do have in common with Dad’s “travel style” is a liking for photographs, for that remembering-the-trip stage of enjoying travel. Jon actually used to rib me quite a lot about how many pictures I take, of everything, all the time… Until we got a “Frameo” digital picture frame. I uploaded pretty much all the photos I’d taken in our decade of marriage, and the frame does a random-shuffle slide-show of our whole marriage. It sits right below the TV screen in our living room, so we get that random sampling of all our adventures, flashed back to us while we sit together on the couch. Not a day goes by that we don’t comment together on something that pops up there—and I notice that Jon hasn’t teased me about taking photographs since I installed the Frameo.

I’m a journaler, too—but I seldom manage to do a trip justice in the journal. I suppose I’m too busy being ON the trip to write much about it, which is why I’m always glad for the photographs. Or drawings. My favorite-ever travel journal is the one from our Maui trip a few years ago, when I actually took a sketch book instead of a diary.

It’s ironic, really, given that my excuse for not writing on trips is the time commitment—and it took me a lot longer to draw than to describe… But on that one trip I had the focus and the energy for it, and I love having that travel record.

I haven’t been drawing much, of late, but I’m suddenly wondering if I can’t get myself back into a “markers” frame of mind before this trip… Drawing always feels like an impossible thing when I’m NOT doing it. But I suppose that’s true of anything.

Weight loss, for example. Which reminds me: it’s time I got on the treadmill!