last hours before travel always stresses me out

Whenever I travel I have this intense fear that I have forgotten something crucial. Most of the time I end up being correct that I did, in fact, forget something that I need but this time my anxiety has had me going over the possibility in my mind that I actually slept pretty well last night because of one simple fact: I overpacked.

By design I do not have a lot of possessions. I have always said that I want my entire life to fit into 2 large suitcases and a dog carrier. On this 1-month trip I am bringing one large suitcase, one small suitcase, and a carry on backpack that is a normal size backpack and only has a few things in it.

My anxiety is at ease because essentially I am bringing about 75% of the clothes that I own with me. Is this sensible? Of course not. Since I will not travel over the Pacific Ocean using a budget airline, a mistake that I made one and only one time - I am given a massive 23 x 2 kg of allowed baggage. I am nowhere near that point with these two bags and neither one of them are full. I have left plenty of space to put some bottles of real tequila to share with my pals upon my return.

The largest part of my anxiety is because of the fact that I am going to have to abandon Nadi for a month and even though I have taken rather extreme precautions of her being looked after by a live-in minder who I know seriously cares about dogs and especially my dog, I know that as much as I feel an attachment towards her, she feels it even more so towards me. I do not know how she is going to react upon my disappearance. There have been times in the past when she went on a hunger strike when I was gone and the only solution was to give her the expensive dog food and if she pulls that trick again this time, I am prepared for it.

I cut off all of her iconic long ear hair so that the person minding her doesn't have to keep brushing them and cleaning them because I already know that she drags them through every dirty thing she can possibly find on the street when she is on walks. I don't think Nadi cares even a little bit what she looks like so perhaps she is more comfortable this way and we will just end up keeping it this way from this point forward.

So my flight departs in a mere 4 hours and in 2 hours, I will head to the airport. For those of you living in the west this might not seem like enough time but trust me when I say that it is an excessive amount of time to turn up 2 hours before your international flight in the Da Nang airport. There are not very many international flights that arrive and depart from here, so few that all of them can fit on a single digital board / TV screen in the terminal. Immigration is almost always overstaffed unlike most other places in the world so if you turn up 2 hours early, there is a better than average chance that you are going to spend 1.5 of those hours in the uncomfortable chairs in the terminal area staring at the overpriced Burger King stall.

This flight, due to no other options, is going to be the longest overall flights I have ever taken in my life clocking in at a total of 40 hours of travel time. This is a crazy amount of time for a person to spend in flights and in airports but there just isn't any other way regardless of how much money you are willing to spend. No matter how I sliced and diced this journey, I was going to end up spending 8 hours standing in LAX (Los Angeles) airport, which unfortunately is an airport I have been to many times before and loathe it. It deserves its reputation of being one of the worst airports in the world despite, apparently, a 14 billion dollar upgrade it has received in the past 10 years. I think at a certain point a city needs to admit that given the limited space they are dealing with, that it is time to move the airport and move it out of town. Kind of like almost every single large city in Asia has done.

Think of Kuala Lumpur or Bangkok for example: These airports at first glance appear to be absurdly far from the city center but this was by design. By building so far away and then providing efficient train systems for everyone using it, they have made these airports much better and nice for the people that use it. LAX on the other hand, has always been dead center in the city and as the crow flies it should only be 15 minutes from the main city areas. BUT but but... as it turns out when you have 12 million people all using the same roads proximity isn't really a great factor and therefore LAX experiences waits of hours on the roads just to get to it. Of course I will not be experiencing that because I have no intention of leaving the airport even though I am entitled to do so since I am American.

I don't have a great deal of love for my country and this isn't a political thing. I just got tired of the American Dream a long time ago and have no intention of ever returning to it.

40 hours. It seems like an eternity. I am bringing many things to keep me occupied including a Nintendo DS that was covered in dust, a Nintendo Switch I borrowed from a friend, two books, a battery-efficient laptop, and of course 2 phones. Also, as I am sure you know, airplanes these days have entertainment centers with hundreds of films and series on them these days anyway.

just 1.5 hours until I fly out now. I wish I wasn't dreading this so much. I think that my mind will be put more at ease once I arrive in Taipei and am waiting at my first layover for 3 hours... then the real long flight of 12 hours straight begins. Thankfully this flight will be during a normal "night" cycle for me. I have no illusion that I will be able to avoid jet lag but I am going to do my best to try and do just that.

The worst part of this trip is going to be when I am in LAX a full 8 hours. My attack plan there is to be the last person in line for everything since I literally have no reason to hurry. I'm excited to see how absurdly over-priced everything is when I get to the awful combination of both USA and an airport. I fully expect a Diet Coke to be something crazy like 8 dollars. We'll see.