Becoming an early-riser

For most of my life I´ve been a notoriously early riser, and the whole thing can be blamed on one incredibly traumatizing incident that occurred when I was around the age of 6. My family had been visiting my aunt and travelled home by train, which took several days. After the first night spent on the train, I woke up rather late, and an absolutely horrifying thing had happened. My family had gone for breakfast without me. Not only that, but my sister had been allowed to keep the flower off the table in the dining car, and had brought it back to the sleeper car with her. When you are a child and you get to keep a real, live (and by that I mean freshly cut and slowly dying) flower from a train dining car, that puts you in the same class as your favourite Disney princess (which is probably Belle since she´s so smart and still gets to wear a ballgown and be emotionally abused by someone who you know deep down would be a nice guy if he wasn´t so hairy and would allow your sweetness to nurture his soul). My sister was a Disney princess who got hot breakfast and flowers and I was the sad anthropomorphic lamp (or tea cup or whatever) who slept until 11 on a train. So I learned at an early age that sleeping in is a sure-fire way to miss out on breakfast, romance, and all the other adventures that occur before noon on a weekday. For the next 15 years I shot out of bed at 7am.

Airplane trips and other things that are never as exciting as sitcoms would have led me to believe.

I know it is the job of a sitcom to make incredibly mundane events seem like hilarious adventures, but I still haven´t gotten over the fact that in real life, most flights, weddings, and attempts to order soup tend to go off without a hitch. Other than confusing my travel mates by becoming overly excited about buying a zebra print neck pillow, and getting loopy towards the end of the 22 hours we spent in transit*, the flight was rather like every other flight I´ve ever taken (as in, with a surprising lack of crashes, cannibalism, David Bowie or any other celebrity making a surprise appearance from the first class cabin, 10-hour delays, marriage proposals, escaped animals, or children being separated from their parents and ending up in New York City).

Pack light...

For me, the excitement of traveling has always been linked to an excessive willingness to sacrifice comforts along the way. This determination to experience hardship usually begins in the preliminary packing phase of trip preparations. I shove everything I need into a bag, decide the bag is too bulky, and convince myself that my trip will be ruined if I insist on bringing more than the barest of essentials with me (no way will my adventure be ruined by the misguided notion that I need both a toothbrush AND a hairbrush on this trip! Only one may stay!), as if backpacking through Europe is akin to fleeing the bolshevik revolution.

Inevitably, while I sacrifice an essential item, I will also have packed multiples of an item, or one bulky and oddly specific item, which I would only need in the rarest of cases. The result of this is an awkward conversation with my travel partners, about 8 hours in to the journey, when I have to explain why I made a conscious decision to leave my shampoo/towel/pajamas/clothes* behind, but I still brought my recorder/stapler/entire jewelry box with me. Will I regret packing three pairs of footwear, three kinds of tylenol, and all the bandaids I own, but only one pair of shorts when I arrive in Madrid?

Maybe. But in my mind, being in Europe will be such a grand adventure that having only one pair of shorts to wear for a 30 day stretch will hardly make a difference in the grand scheme of things (but having 3 different kinds of a headache could).

*That was an awkwardly memorable instance that did NOT make me any friends.