Just a few days to go now, before my big trip, and I'm sure I'm going to be running out the door, thinking, "do I have everything?". I'll close the door, head to the elevator and suddenly stop and shout "Money, tickets, passport!", like Edina in "Absolutely Fabulous". If I'm pathologically organized, it's only because I have a crappy, absent-minded memory, and if I don't plan everything, something will be overlooked. So I'm keeping my money, passport and tickets close to my chest.

It's surprising how complex it is to plan a two month foreign trip. Particularly if you're a six-foot-six online journalizer on a high protein diet :) First, in addition to all the normal paraphanalia of the laptop, adaptors, multiple cameras, and wiring, you need all the extra stuff to ensure you're connected. Foreign telephone and electricity adaptors, a voltage transformer, a mini surge protector, a digital line tester, extra flash-memory as a small, portable form of disk-backup, even an old-fashioned acoustic coupler. I'm gonna be connected, goddammit!

Just a few of the gizmos I'm taking with me

For months, now, I've been making long lists of things I have to get done before leaving. Stop my New York Times, suspend my automobile liability insurance and gym membership, put my cell phone on hold, tell my cleaning company not to come for two months, get someone to pick up my mail, yadda yadda. I reminded myself to check ahead of time to make sure I could even find my passports, and I had a scare the other day when I finally got around to trying to cross that item off my do-list. I couldn't find my US passport! After a day of panic, I found it in a place it shouldn't have been.

Two months is a fairly long time, and who knows if I'll be able to find stuff over there in darkest Europe :) So I'm packing extras of everything - double supply of my claritin prescription, an enormous tub of multivitamins, extra hair goup and melatonin, and a whopping heap of one-hundred- and-twenty protein bars!

Protein bars up the whazzoo (spelling?)

The hardest thing to plan was the itinerary, of course. Since London is always full of horrible foreigners in the Summer (yanks like me :), and it's a big holiday year in Rome, I didn't want to leave hotel rooms to chance, so I booked everything months ago. Now I'm tied firmly to a rigid schedule. I guess if I find that hotels aren't as full as I expected, I can make changes to my itinerary when I'm over there, for those hotels I didn't have to prepay. But the whole thing was complicated additionally, by the need to get hotel rooms with direct-dial telephone lines so that I can keep up-to-date with the website.

Naturally, it was necessary to buy more clothes too. It's quite logical when you think about it. My closet is full of clothes I never wear, so if I pack them in my suitcase, they're just wasting space since I won't wear them abroad either. So it stands to reason that I need to buy more clothes. QED

Assuming I don't forget anything, the top item on my do-list is to actually have fun while I'm over there. Hope I don't forget to cross that item off my list!