Where have I been? I’ve been in Europe! I had grand plans to get my blog installments loaded in before we left for Spain and Italy, but that didn’t happen. And one does not announce one is out of the country on a public blog, even if one does have the most wonderful of house/dogsitters to watch the fort while one is gone.
And because I know you’re asking, no, there will not be a DestiKNITions Italy or Spain episode. That’s right, in a fit of uncharacteristic restraint, I did not research the local yarn shops in Rome, Florence, Barcelona, or Naples. I did not force my family to accompany me into a foreign fiber frenzy (but I did have clearance to go inside should we happen across one...and no, I didn’t stack the travel deck in that regard). I might write a little note to Norwegian Cruise Line, however, about how they could install an awesome on-board fiber shop with a certain highly entertaining blog host as celebrity endorser.
With a double round of transatlantic air travel, you can imagine I planned for loads of knitting time. We had a ten-hour layover in Newark waiting for us, not to mention all those lines and flights. A gold-mine of knitting productivity.
Yep, that was the plan.
Didn’t happen.
While I was smart enough to get lots of knitting done on the cruise excursion tour bus, I didn’t use my “drug of choice” when I needed it most: airports and airplanes. Instead, I let the trip turn into a bleary parade of creeping lines, frantic phone calls, multi-flight re-routing, and other associated travel disasters rendering me too fried to knit. I got in a couple of pattern repeats on the outgoing flight, and that was it. The rest was a fatigue-soaked blur of cramped, pressurized, and dehydrated stress. At least the Barcelona authorities didn’t make me surrender my circular needles (we worried about those metal tips).
The point here is that I should have knit. I should have pulled out my knitting in the hour-long customs line that forced us to miss our flight. In the 11-hour fatigue-fest that was our Barcelona-to-Newark return flight. In the unplanned detour to Houston while trying to find a way to Newark out of Chicago’s flood-induced flight cancellations. I could have knit. Yes, we were shuffling along every minute or so, and I let that goad me into thinking knitting was impossible. Why? When, short of driving or conducting surgery or meeting the Queen, is knitting ever “impossible?”
So what did I do instead? What I always do when I have to wait without knitting: work myself into a lather. Really, I should have some kind of label pinned to my shirt that says “Tell this lady to knit OR ELSE EVERYONE WILL PAY DEARLY.”
Lesson learned. Next trip, I WILL KNIT. Or else. Because it’s best for everyone, including me.
1 comment:
Oh, honey... I would have told you to knit. Wow!!! I can finally be the teacher to my knitting master. Oh, wait. You learned that on your own. :)
Seriously, I have no idea how I ever survived flying without knitting.
The worst flight OF MY LIFE was coming home from visiting my dying grandmother, and this nutcase flight attendant on American (an airline I will never fly again) told me that I could not knit because it was a projectile hazard. I would have shown her exactly how hazardous that statement was, except that these days, if you breathe wrong at a flight attendant, they kick you off the plane. So I pretended to smile nicely, put my knitting away, and somehow got through that miserable flight.
That said, Southwest is wonderful, and not only do they embrace my knitting on the plane, but I also tend to meet fellow plane knitters on my flights.
Glad you had a good trip, and I can't wait to hear all about it!!
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