The summer weather has hit here with a vengeance. My least favorite season is summer in Pennsylvania, which almost always equals hot and humid. But I have lived in this state my whole life, so I expect summer to be miserable, which is why I complain that spring is too short, and fall doesn’t come fast enough.
But when it’s too miserable to go outside for very long, it’s the perfect time to stay inside and read. Or write.
Or, in my case right now, freak out because my trip to New York is in nine days. I need to make my list of everything that has to be packed. Then I have to figure out how I’m going to get it all in one small suitcase. Then I will go through my freak-out phase when I’m sure I’ve forgotten something. Or more than one something. These are my expectations for travel prep. I know myself pretty well, and even though I may have a multi-page list before I pack, inevitably, something gets left off the list. Hopefully, it’s nothing absolutely necessary.
Then there are the expectations for New York in July: hot, tourist-crowded, and expensive. The good news is, I have roommates. This is also not my first trip to NYC, so I know a few places we’ll go that won’t cost us a fortune. But we’ll be staying right in the middle of Times Square, so it’s tourist-central there.
I would love some suggestions for places to go that might not be so jam-packed with tourists when we get there. We’ll be at a conference, so we won’t actually get to leave the hotel until evening most days, and I know all of the other visitors will be out, too.
I also expect not to get any writing done for the five days we’re there. There will be too much else going on, plus by the end of a full day of workshops, despite being excited and inspired, my brain will be too full and too busy to focus on writing much. Which is why I’m hoping to get the first draft of Medusa #3 finished before we leave next week. I’d wanted to be further by now, the #2 slowed me down. I actually only have a few thousand words left to write to finish this first draft, and then I expect to have a lot of polishing and revising to do before I can send it off to my agent.
What sort of expectations do you have when you go on a trip, no matter whether it’s a vacation or a working trip?
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