Just breathe.

I am not usually a fan of travel days. They involve early wake ups, stressful situations that I do not like to be in, lots of running and rushing between places, lots of luggage that needs transferring, along with lots of people in cramped spaces. There's just nothing comfortable about a travel day. For whatever reason, today felt...different. Maybe it was the early wake-up after a night of not enough sleep. Maybe it was the fact that I was very much on schedule with my packing, and had nothing to throw together at the last minute. But when I woke up at 5 am to begin the long process of getting to a final destination, I felt this sense of calm. Or perhaps nonchalance. Or even a half-awake zombie-like zen state. I felt like I was simply floating through the actions, not letting the stress of anything get to me. Which, honestly, is a completely new thing for me - ask Mario.

In the dim of a single light in the kitchen this morning, I made a couple of bowls of oatmeal with all the leftover fruit in the house, while I heated the kettle for coffee. Still half-dressed, I wandered about, collecting the last of my carry-on items, stuffing spoonfuls of oatmeal in my mouth - Mario fed the cats. At 5:30, our lift arrived and I was still attempting to tame my hair, but panic didn't set in - I just twisted it as best I could and resigned myself to the fact that I would do something with it later. It didn't matter. 

Once at the airport, I got a dud check-in machine - for whatever reason, the touch screen was not responding to my fingers, nor was it functioning very rapidly. Mario was getting impatient with the system, but I just kinda let it do its thing, mashing the next button when appropriate, until it finally spit out our luggage tags. I normally would have begun panicking then, but it just seemed so trivial. Plus, it was not like we were getting anywhere fast - though we should check in 3 hours beforeour  flight, at 6 am, the customs counter would not be open until 7 am, so we would only be rushing to another area to just wait in line. So we took our time.

We wandered slowly through the security line, and instead of rushing to get everything into those plastic bins, getting myself all in a panic because I don't want to be that person, the one that holds up the line, today I took my time. Everyone else does, and then I get panicked, so why shouldn't I do the same? And when I emerged from the big scanner, I calmly collected my things, reset and moved along. It felt so good to not have a care in the world about what people were thinking. Chances are, they were just as much in their own travel day bubbles and didn't even notice me.

And the day went much the same way. When our flight was scheduled to start boarding, the plane wasn't even at the gate yet, so we took the extra time to get water and use the toilet. When we realized we only had pay options for food on our flight, we pulled out oranges and Christmas cookies that I had packed and snacked on those instead. When we arrived at LAX and couldn't disembark because the flight bridge was broken, we stayed in out seats and continued playing our movies, while everyone else stood in the alley, squashed and desperate to get off the plane. We just stayed chill. We waited an extra 25 minutes for our bus for Torrance to arrive at LAX, but the air was so warm, the sun was out and the flowers under the overpass were blooming - plus, the bus driver waived our fare, because Christmas. And given that the city was empty and not a lot of people were riding the bus, the trip to our motel took less time than we expected it to, leaving us more time to relax and shower off the travel grime before heading out to dinner.

So I guess, in the end, the zen-like attitude paid off. We arrived at the Driftwood Motel, a place trapped in the 1950s, calm and collected, dropped out bags and didn't have the weight of a stressful travel day bogging us down. It was a new feeling, and a welcome one at that. I could do this more often.

De-icing the plane - a study in colour	Flying in over Los Angeles
A spaceship at LAX!	Catching a glimpse of the Grand Canyon from above
Waiting for the 232 bus to Torrance	Straight out of a movie - our hotel
This is not a sign of winter.	Mongolian Hot Pot for Christmas!

For something a little different, Christmas dinner this year is Mongolian Hot Pot, fragrant and rich, full of vegetables and tofu and mushrooms, sliced of flavourful lamb and springy shrimp balls. We share the experience with a good friend we got the chance to meet up with while in town, sharing stories of travel and theatre while wrestling with the best way to fish noodles from the pot with nothing but a ladle. And now, I blog while Mario studies the craziness that is Los Angeles interstate interchanges, both of us trying hard  not to fall asleep too early. Because even though it felt relaxed and zen, this is still a travel day, and no matter how zen you may feel, travel days always take a ton of energy and leave you feeling drained by the end of them. 

Time for some much-needed sleep.