An idea is brewing in my head. It started yesterday morning when random channel surfing found me staring in fascination at a program about a theoretical train tunnel between NY and London. You would have a 750 mile acceleration part of the tunnel then you enter an airlock and move into a vaccuum where the train that is floating on a magnetic fields reaches 5000 miles per hour and then you decelerate for the last 750 miles. Total transit time? 54 minutes.

Well, I don’t care if it is theoretical. I want to be on it. That is just way cool. That started me thinking about London. I want to go to England. I fancy myself the kind of person who can decide to just up and go to Europe and have a bit of a wander around. I speak English so that will help when my wandering around gets me lost. Have I ever gone just a wandering? No. But let’s not mess with my mental image of myself.

Combine this thinking with the fact that I am not in Hawaii this week. I should be in Hawaii but the airline doubled the amount of frequent flyer miles needed to get there this week so it was just out of reach. Not to mention I broke myself and wasn’t sure how healed I would be at the time that I needed to be making arrangements.

So my brain is saying London and pondering frequent flyer miles. A plan is starting to form. I have enough to go to London if there is no sneaky doubling of the mileage required. Why if I went I could pop over to France on the train just to say I’ve been. (I actually have been before on a tour bus that popped over the border from Germany just to say we’d been. All I saw of France was the nastiest highway rest stop ever.)

This plan is dependant on getting away from the husband. I will sleep anywhere. I don’t care about the quality of hotel. This makes the trip cheaper and therefore possibly possible. The husband is a snob. I don’t want to let him ruin my trip with his whining. Besides, I want to go to France. You know those people who chant “Boycott France”? I’m married to one of them. I’ve never actually heard him use the phrase freedom fries but I’m sure that’s because he knows it would lead straight to a divorce.

So I inform him I’m going on vacation. He says he wants to go. I say no because I’m planning my ideal trip and he wouldn’t like it. He says, “You’re going to France, aren’t you?” I reply that I was thinking of it and he says that he would love to go to France. The idea of him actually talking to French people is horrifying. We would be banned for life.

But he still wants to go. So I started looking to see how much a ticket is. Lo and behold you can fly direct to London from the local airport. You can’t catch a train anywhere within 150 miles but you can fly direct to London. The ticket was under $600 which isn’t really bad if I can fly free. I started looking at cheap hotels. It was seeming more and more doable. Something had to go horribly wrong.

Today we got an unexpected tax refund check in the mail for an amount that would pay for his ticket and a week in a cheap hotel. I think that’s a sign.

Just think of all the 101 things in 1001 days that this would cover:

    Take a trip with frequent flyer miles
    Get my passport stamped
    Take a train somewhere – although I meant for that to be in the U.S.