The Art of the 23-Day Journey

How many hours were lost to reservation-making this past weekend? We are book for Italy this summer, a trip already distracting for all of the can't wait-ing around here. But something happened as I got my tickets together, moving the trip back by a day to save a few hundred dollars, figuring out when I'll be in Rome, Sicily, on the Adriatic.

I looked down at the Orbitz page awaiting my credit card and there it was: Total days=23.

Now I've been known to give too much emphasis to numbers, dates, and such things. But the fact that I'm writing a book about a 23-day journey and then taking a 23-day journey the following year--an entirely different journey--seems important to me. And Chris, not enamored with dates nor even (frankly) with synchronicity, added when I raced off to tell him, "Twenty-three is my birth day as well."

So there it is. Today, on paper, I'll ponder the art of the 23-day road trip.

And I'll ponder what it will mean for me to return to Rome 12 or 13 years later. It was in Rome that my traveler identity was solidified, in ways I'll tell at another time. And that identity is the one that sent me off on the road last year, hitting the Merritt Parkway in a rented Chevy Malibu with an American flag in the window.