Reign it in.

When planning a trip, it’s not my strong suit. I like to climb the mountain, see what’s on the other side, then spend a month looking at the other side of every mountain within a 100-mile radius. I am a human basically devoid of that career ambition that motivates so many. But when it comes to travel, I’m Gordon Gekko.

So here we go, reigning in it.

Here’s the issue: school age child must attend school. There are laws. So where we used to have two months and the world was our oyster, we now have a week and the world is our…hot dog? Spam? Tuna casserole? I don’t know, but it’s not delicious.

While reigning it in, I became riddled with indecision. The math didn’t add up. Why does it take only half the money to travel a quarter of the time? Should we go to Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guatemala. Should we just homeschool from a farmhouse in Umbria. Yes. Wait, no. Ahhh!!!!

Mentally exhausted, I put myself in the passenger seat and let others do unto me as I have done unto so many others. I sat back and listened to the fabulous travel plans of my friends. I let their adventure and excitement seep in and in the end we decided to join our friends, at least in part, in a trip they had planned to central Mexico. That’s right. I became the travel enabled.

In the end, with the help of very generous grandparent babysitters, an ambivalence to mild Kindergarten truancy and some ambitious jet-setting (more on that later), we squeezed one week into 18 days and headed to Mexico.

There was a moment when I thought, in an embarrassing display of brattiness, that if I could only travel for a short amount of time then it wasn’t worth the effort at all. But I’m reminded, as I look out over the majestic Zocalo in Mexico City and I feel the urgency of memory that comes with seeing something truly amazing for the first and possibly last time, that every week, every day and every second of travel is worth it.