Travel.

Just got back from two weeks in Australia. I must be getting old, because the thrill of travel no longer overwhelms the torture of airplanes. Don't get me wrong - I'm still the kind of person who loves to fly, providing the flight is a few hours long. I love sliding efficiently through security checks, because I pre-separated my liquids and emptied my pockets that morning. I love pointless shopping to kill time, and grabbing a beer at the airport bar. I don't even mind relaxing with a book for a few hours in-flight, free of distractions. I have a little ritual of buying a magazine and gum to get me through the Kindle-free stages of takeoff and landing.

However, a 15 hour flight, especially in the midst of a 28 hour travel cycle with bookended short flights and layovers is finally too much for my broken little neck to take. I've taken these before - namely to move to Korea so I had a full 4 months resting time between flights. But usually I break them up - say, with an overnight in Jordan en route to India. And before now, I always lucked out with a stretch of 5 middle seats to lie down on and sleep through it.

Not this time. I hereby declare that was my last 9+ hour coach flight. From now on, I either get those fully-flat business seats, or I do another day-long layover. Although, destinations in the U.S. are beckoning. Road trips have a sudden appeal. I'm always in a passenger seat that reclines way back and with Vinny in the drivers' seat, and we stop whenever we feel like it because we're New Yorkers and the Boston-DC corridor is full of small towns with no serviceable vegan food but plenty of rest stops. Ditto for our 3 week, 3200 mile California trip, where even Death Valley gave us enough lookouts for pulling over.

Next week we go to Natick, for a wedding. We're already planning our Sunday stop at Mohegan Sun, a ritual from my Harvard days when we made this trip monthly. We'll book it though the smokey casino with sad dumpy folks glued to the slot machines and make right for Todd English's Tuscany. Beats rest stop Sbarro any day.