Travelogue

Having covered the NBA and its endless playoffs, so I've been on the road for long stretches, but not this long. I left Seattle in June and was on the road for more than five weeks straight. If you count from mid-June, which started in Colorado Springs, and where the stay at home wae so short, it was like an additional stop on a long trip, I was gone more than seven weeks straight.

Do you know how heavy your luggage gets in that time?

During that trip, it rained at every stop except, I think, Portland, which is in the supposedly rainy Pacific Northwest. Yes, it rained in Colorado Springs, Atlanta, Orlando, Birmingham and North Augusta, S.C.

And when I say "rained," I mean thunderstormed. That's sheets of rain, driving down hard. That's rain. What it does here in Seattle is more like Chinese water torture.

Drip, drip, drip.

When you move around so much, your intellect is stretched to remember mundane things such as your room number and, even, what floor you're on at the hotel. The room number in Orlando, for example, was 14-something, even though it was on the top floor, which was the fourth. Huh?

You also get used to a bunch of things that don't cut it at home - never making your bed, having the newspaper delivered right outside your bedroom door, having all meals served, tossing your used towels on the floor. I derived a lot of comfort by finding National Public Radio in every city, knowing it was a nationally shared experience.

Then again, you miss a lot of things, in addition, obviously, to family. I missed my neighborhood farmer's market and the downtown Whole Foods, which is like the Taj Mahal of food. I did miss cooking, which, yes, I do. I missed the New York Times, which I saw only on the days that I flew. I missed typing on a proper keyboard.

Most of all, I missed sleep.