I grew up traveling and crave it like my kids crave candy but because our financial situation hovers over us like a threatening cloud carrying thunderbolts, I must reel myself in and learn to enjoy travel in proximity.

The other day my friend and I left our boys practicing football on the field and walked in the brisk early evening fall air to rendezvous with the other football moms for happy hour. I was feeling a bit like Eeyore, wearing my insecurities on my sleeve and feeling reluctant to say anything lest I reveal my pitiful state. Taking in the energy of the women surrounding me, I let the wine slowly work its magic throughout my body melting away my concerns and my plane began to take off.

These women and I came from different worlds but we all had one significant and mutual similarity, we had ten year old boys practicing football on the field five minutes away from our tipsy sorrows.

My plane landed in their worlds and I spent a wonderful hour enjoying their stories. Jan looked like the innocent Sandra Dee from the movie Grease Lightening, with fair skin, bright big blue eyes and blond hair to her shoulders. She told us how it was difficult at first for her husband from Puerto Rico to adapt to her Mormon family in Utah with a house devoid of alcohol and shaking with shredded carrots embedded in  jello mold.

I invited myself to go with her the next time she visited her husband’s gay uncle in his Colonial mansion in Long Island. It’s not exactly the island that I was dreaming of but maybe what I really need is to escape into other people’s worlds instead of being confined in my own.

I figured that going to the desert was more trouble than it was worth, without Wade to help me, so I am in Denver instead. I still feel as though my head is about to blow off but at least I am encountering something different than the norm. Sometimes it is okay to take the path of least resistance.

I’ll fill you in when I get back, or maybe we’ll just keep heading West.

The desert will have to wait.