diamond shoes, I guess

[flea]

mr. flea and I are on IM trying to work out what travel we will do to see our families in the next little while. We are caught in the trap of living far away from our families, so car travel isn't a practical option. We have 4 people who need plane seats, plus we pretty much need a spare car available at our destination, or a rental. We live 90 minutes from the nearest airport. We have very little vacation time. mr. flea's family wants us to go to Ohio for Easter, at $350 per person, 8 hours travel time (4 in the air, plus travel and check in time at both ends). For a total of 36 hours with his family. We are supposed to go to my half-brother's wedding in NH in May, similar issues, though it is far enough out that we can probably get nonstop flights at a decent price, more like $230 each, and take more time, because of Memorial Day. And my mother threatens to sell the Cape Cod house if we don't come this summer, so we're talking about going the last week of June/first week of July.

I'm just overwhelmed by it right now, and miserable. Imagine if we lived within a 3-4 hour drive of all our family members. Our lives would be so different.

Comments

[gchick.livejournal.com]

I don't think this is a diamond shoes problem at all (it is a first-world problem, which is how I misremembered your subject line before I switched tabs to come back and reply, but in a whole different sense than we usually mean it*). Access to family is all kinds of important; travel schedules and budgets that blow the whole vacation will only add to the stress rather than allowing family time to be the supporting thing it really ought to be; we didn't evolve for the kind of distances and schedules where going the fast way means that you spend a full day traveling for a day and a half on the ground. Your stress at all this is completely understandable and your pinchy diamond shoes are the kind that aren't.


* (In that to-the-hour vacation scheduling and widely scattered locations for professional rather than refugee reasons are a very first world thing. But still not in the sense that such problems comprise whining about one's luxuries!)