Shopping Leads To Revelation

I have had the strangest urge in the last couple of days to spend money. Actually it may go back longer than that, in this particular bout of commerce glee, but it was pronounced yesterday while watching the nightmare unfold around my bracket. I found myself again looking at the bags from posts prior, reconsidering netbooks, telling the wife “It’s like if i focus enough on the iPad 2 it’ll magically do what I need it to.” I legitimately brushed through the various Nokia and Sony Ericsson offerings for unlocked phones on Amazon. I even found my mind drifting back to outerwear options.

And then, this morning, I saw an article on Boing Boing about people who travel ultra-light – either just what they have in their pockets, or what they can fit in the travel vest and jacket, or maybe a light daypack, and everything snapped into place for me:

I’m trying to outfit myself to go back to England and hike down the Cotswold Way.

It all makes sense now. Less than a month ago I bought the hiking boots and the drawz you can wash in the sink and dry overnight. I’ve already got things that could work for outerwear that combine for warmth and water resistance. God knows I have an overwhelming desire to pack light, certainly no more than would go in, say, a compact messenger bag or my roll-top backpack. Now I just need some way to keep up with RSS and blogging from the UK, which notionally means putting the phone in airplane mode for the duration, and all of a sudden you’re looking at a Nokia C3-01 for under $150 unlocked or trying to find some way to unlock an iPhone 4 running iOS 4.3 or wondering if the Kindle’s 3G data works abroad and how tough it is to set up post-by-mail or whether it would be worthwhile to splash out on a 16GB iPad and hope it’s not locked and…

You get the idea.

Apparently I’m more dialed into this than I thought. Some combination of the changing sunlight and longer days, coupled with rain and gloomy overcast, reinforced by trains and capped off by a desire to get AS FAR FROM MARCH MADNESS AS POSSIBLE* have all combined to put me back in the (British) Empire State of Mind. Now I just need a shit-pile of vacation time and a bigger shit-pile of money. (If you don’t think the wife could work remotely from down the pub, well, you don’t know her company’s business.)

I know it’s been less than a year, but I find myself wanting to get away again without dragging any extra people around. I think the two of us are due for another extracontinental getaway…

* HOW LONG O LORD WILL YOU SUFFER THE VANDERBILT COMMODORES TO…UH…SUFFER?

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