I am resting in my hotel room in Nice after a trip by train to Monte Carlo today to visit the enrichment manager for Silversea. I find bus and train stations more stressful than airports for some reason I can’t quite put a finger on (Fewer information kiosks? Poor signage? General grimness? I’m not sure. ) But how utterly luxurious it was to travel somewhere without my suitcases, and with a ticket that worked not just for a specific train, like airlines do for planes, but for any train between Nice and Monte Carlo that day. Easy? Travel can be easy? I had forgotten.
That appointment was the only thing I had to do at a specific time while in Nice, except go to the airport to pick up my partner, Dan, on Sunday night, when he joins me for our long-awaited cruise from Monte Carlo to Venice. Until then, there’s no need to watch the clock, or put together much in the way of a plan for my time.
My “breather,” as usual, includes work, since I am not quite done with all my lectures for the Baltic in July. Here’s my plan: work until late morning, play through lunchtime until mid-afternoon, then work again until I don’t want to anymore, sometime in the evening. That’s about all the structure I need.
So tomorrow, I will jump into the roughly half-hour segment I need on Copenhagen, then go poke around Old Nice, then back to work on Copenhagen again. Two days, and that talk will ( I hope) be ready to go. Then if I do the same for the next two days, Stockholm will be in the bag just as Dan arrives. That would be perfect, since those cities are the last two things I need to finish up for the Baltic.
Breathe then? Well, a little, but those really deep breaths, the ones that turn into happy sighs and melted limbs, will have to wait till the bags are packed up, transported, unpacked again, and the ship has set sail.
UPDATE: Got all the work done. Drove myself pretty hard, but ready for the Baltic! Dan arrives this evening. Let the vacation begin!