Squeeze into This

As I see my life’s twilight twinkling on the not far distant horizon, I have decided to wobble to my feet and . . .

throw on a backpack and hit the road.

By the time we leave we will qualify for senior discounts.   Maybe I should be figuring out ways to make travel less strenuous — limo to and from the airport, check bags at the curb, first class tickets, bag delivery service to and from the ship, etc.  Not yet.

No, I have decided to accept the Rick Steves challenge of less than 20 pounds and carry-on only.  Toward that end, I purchased a Rick Steves Convertible Carry-on bag from Amazon.  It is the largest bag that meets the limits on all the major airlines for carry-on.  It can be carried by its very comfy shoulder strap or, yes indeedy, with its removable backpack straps.

I chose the funky blue spruce color to help me find it on the baggage belt.  “I thought you weren’t checking your bag,” you say?  I’m not checking it going out, but I expect to check coming home with my booty.  The bag expands beyond carry-on limits to allow stashing one’s acquired travel loot for the trip home.

If my knees buckle (okay, my one good knee buckles), I’ll return to the land of roller boards by which all sensible people swear.

When I was a wee tyke, I asked my older, more sensible, sister if she would go off of the high dive with me.   Craftily, she replied, “If you go first,” thinking perhaps that I would either (a) chicken out, letting her off the hook, or (b) die in my collision with the water, also letting her off the hook.  Sadly for her, I both dived and survived resulting in her following me into deep water.   On this cruise, I will again reprise my role as a family dare devil going first back into the pre-roller board primordial approach of backpacking.  Who knows?  Perhaps I will have reached back so far that I find myself to be a bit younger than I first expected.  Either way, you’ll read about it here.