Summer Plans Made

In my previous post, I talked about trying to plan a summer getaway that would get me out of the blazing central Texas summer heat (and the intense sun). Well, the next day, I happened to be browsing kayak.com (What? Not everyone else just puts in random flight requests to see what’s possible?) when I saw that flights from Austin to Seattle – a city that I hadn’t been to before but was high on the U.S. wish list – were actually a decent fare. OK, so I subscribe to pretty much every travel email, newsletter, and alert under the sun; so I had already known that there were some pretty good airfare sales happening on Tuesday. But the pricing for those non-stops were particularly intriguing.

Normally, I talk these things over with my husband, who hems and haws about it until the airfare is no longer on sale. (You think I’m joking? Last week, I tried to make alternative plans for a long weekend in May only to find when I tried to book the airfare the following day, it had risen over $100 per person. Needless to say, I’m staying home in May…) But because of the experience last week, I basically told him that I was going and if he wanted to come with me, he needed to tell me right then.

Ploy worked! I booked tickets to go up to Seattle for my birthday week. But, I also decided that since I was already going to be up in Seattle, shouldn’t I do something else that I had also been thinking about doing? So, even before I booked my airfare, I looked up a few things, crossed an idea off the list, but instead came up with a different idea. So, when my husband gets on the plane in Seattle to fly home to Austin, I’m going to board the Empire Builder Amtrak and ride the rails for 2 days through Washington, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and all the way into Chicago, Illinois (where I’ll probably hang out for a day or two before flying home from there)… And I splurged and got myself a sleeping compartment.

Not only am I going to fulfill a promise that I made to myself when I got my pink melanoma cut out of my life to try a rail adventure in the U.S., but I’m also going to be able to cross three more “I haven’t been there yet” states off the dwindling list! It’s silly how excited I am about the train portion of the adventure. I’m one of those people who really likes to travel solo; and this entire trip is going to a combination of traveling and exploring a new place with my husband, AND traveling and exploring solo. And for whatever reason, train travel is one of those experiences that seem much more interesting than flying or driving. Maybe because I’ve flown quite a bit already. Maybe because commuting has killed the fun of driving for me unless I’m by myself getting “lost” on back roads – but even then, you have to pay attention to the road instead of the scenery (unless you pull over every 5 seconds to gawk, which I do when I can)… This will be my first Amtrak experience and I’m really looking forward to seeing what it’s like. And I’m super excited to try the experience as a sleeping car passenger on a multi-day trip.

And now I also get to plan the whole “checking out Seattle” portion, maybe taking a ferry to one of the San Juan Islands for the day, and we even have a few days to go look at Rainier and perhaps hit a vineyard or two along the way. We actually have a week before he flies home and I get on the train; so there are lots of options we can explore.

And for me, that whole anticipation of doing something fun like this is what gets me through tough days. Like I said in previous posts, when I found out I had an aggressive form of melanoma, the first thing I thought was, “I’m not done here yet. There’s so much more I need to see and do.” I realized that I spent a lot of my adult years working and waiting for “someday” to do the things that I wanted to do. But my pink melanoma made me also realize that “someday” isn’t promised to me. And I needed to make today “someday”.