This was the staircase I had to navigate each day. The steps were concrete, and slippery, and the rail didn’t come all the way up to the top or down to the bottom. And the very first step (under the grip tape) had only about a three inch rise and I stumbled on it more than once.

Traveling presents one with all sorts of challenges. Mostly I had an easy time of things on my journey to San Miguel de Allende. But I’m getting older and I feel the impacts a lot more than I did when I was younger!

Flying, for instance. It really beats me up these days. The elevation changes and the pressure changes in the cabin mess with my sinuses. I spend most of my time on a plane chewing gum, working my jaw, and popping my ears. It takes days for me to recover after flying.

I can’t stand being confined in a metal tube. That’s the other thing. The physical discomfort is nothing compared to the anxiety. I can handle about two hours and after that I get restless and irritated. I want to get up and run around. I’ve never been claustrophobic but big ol’ jet airliners don’t feel so big when you are stuffed into them with a few hundred other folks.

This trip reminded me how much I hate flying. Oh, I can sit by a window and take in the fabulous views. I’m like a little kid when it comes to that stuff. But that’s not enough. All the rest of the experience sucks. Airports ought to be wonderful places but they’re just really fancy hell-holes. About the only thing you can do is sit at a bar and drink.

When I think about traveling in the future I think about boats. And trains. And buses. Stuff like that. It’s going to be hard to get to South America or somesuch place without flying, but I’m motivated to figure it out. I can do a short hop. The flight to LA is only two hours, for example, and it’s a pretty pleasant trip. I can manage that sort of thing. But across the continent? Over an ocean? Forget about it. My body can’t take it. And I’ll have a bad attitude, and you can’t have a bad attitude when you travel.

There’s always the other option: staying home. Costs a lot less. Smaller environmental footprint. Easier on the body. For most of human history people went no further than a day’s walk, or maybe two, from the place they were born. People routinely walked 20-25 miles in a day so a two-day journey could take you pretty far, but exotic, far-off locales remained exotic and far away. A big city a hundred miles away was just as far as another country a thousand miles away. Today one can get halfway across the world in half a day. Jet travel became affordable for regular folks by the 1970s and that was fifty years ago. Cruising along at a brisk 500 knots, five miles above the earth, unimaginable not that long ago, is just another routine event in a modern person’s life.