For someone who travels a lot I sure hate packing.

For someone who travels a lot I sure hate packing. Subsequently, I leave it to the last moment and then panic rises like mist from a swamp. And of course, my iPod, on which I’ll be leaning during the train journey from Ljubljana to Belgrade, decided to give up the ghost this afternoon around fourish. WHERE DID I PUT MY MUSIC?? On which of my twenty five back up discs are my Bachs, my Mozarts, anything that’ll keep me from going bonkers on the nine hours bonkerdiebonk journey to the New York of Eastern Europe. Why are vacations to disastrously stressful? I love holidays but I hate going on one. I’m looking forward to the cathedrals in Belgrade, the hours of  walking from one coffee place to the next. I love the squares full of people mulling about, or sitting in a park with a book in the shade. It’s been raining for forty days and forty nights here in the Netherlands but on the news tonight I saw that it’s twenty degrees centigrade where I’m going. Ah, the sun. I’ve forgotten how she looks…

WHAT am I BLABBERING about? I have to go to the bank to get Serbian money. I have to go shopping for gifts for my hosts. I have to have the car checked. BUT I CAN’T because I have to figure out how to copy 6578 tunes from a dusty hard disk to my iPod. How the GROWLL did that go again? Of course my C drive is full. Should I delete my novel? Only took ten years to write. Maybe I can move it to hard disk number twenty four. Write on a yellow stickie note where it is… I have so many yellow stickies everywhere, I should keep a log. Which ever suitcase I open, a cloud of yellow stickies – all imperative markers that keep my life together – flies up in a tired sigh, leaving me with nothing but chaos.

Tomorrow at dawn I’ll drive off. I made reservations at the Holiday Inn in Munich Messe. It took me an hour to put the location in my TomTom because officially it’s called Feldkirche over there and not Munich. It’ll be eight or nine hours from here (Noordgouwe in Zeeland, the Netherlands) to my hotel in Munich. The next day I’ll drive on to Ljubljana, where I will spend a day with a family to which my attentions incline with great favor. They’ll show me the town, and at some point we’ll buy a ticket for the train to Belgrade. I rented a lovely little apartment in the middle of the Old Town. It has a bath tub. I’m bringing candles and green tea. If I repress the idea of having to drive through four noisy countries, spending a night in the middle of nowhere and a day with strangers, a nine hour train ride without an iPod, and a dead man’s walk from the Belgrade station to my little apartment, with the bath tub, with the candles… I can almost taste the bubbles.