jealous of travel bloggers

Sometimes I think I would enjoy being a travel blogger, lugging my laptop with me on planes, trains and automobiles, complaining about jetleg and food poisoning, pretending that I understand the culture of some town that I've only been visiting for a day or two. It sounds glamorous. It sounds like fun. It sounds like it would get old after a while, though.

Now I'm no travelpro, but I've had my fair share of auto excursions thanks to my last session of corporate employment. I didn't really like it, but primarily what I didn't like was the fact that I was traveling alone. Had my wife been with me, things would have been very different. Instead of zoning off in front of the hotel television, watching cable channels that I didn't get at home until I dozed off into the lair of the sandman, I could have been checking out the town and hanging out with my better half.

Nowadays, we've got the kids, though. And I'm not sure how travel bloggers that are parents manage to survive that balancing act. During the summer, the kids are out of school, so there are none of those scheduling conflicts to worry about, but I know how frustrated kids get when they've been in the car for long periods of time. Heck, even adults suffer from "cabin fever" while driving long trips, so it's only natural that a child would act more extreme.

And then there is sibling rivalry - something that scares me to death while on road trips. I remember how it was from when I was a kid, stuck in the back of the station wagon, fighting over who got to sit in the "big seat" by themselves, and who had to share the other one. I remember the smell, that feeling of one's hair being stuck to one's forehead and the cramped sensation in my neck and shoulders when I awoke from sleeping in the car. I remember that itchy synthetic carpet fuzz that would stick to your skin if you slept on it. I remember watching the powerlines dipping up and down, up and down, as we flew past them.

None of those exotic, high style "jet-setting" scenes come into play when you're traveling with children. So as much as I think I'd like to become a travel blogger, I can't see it happening in the near future. We'll just have to wait until the kids are a little older.