Houston, we have a problem

Houston, we have a problem: my husband doesn’t like to travel! We’re taking 2009 off, primarily to gallivant around some portion of the world, and my husband is already calling it quits. Yikes!

He’s itching to go home to California and stay with his mom and eat tamale pie, and go to my mom’s and eat green-and-gold stew. With daily visits to the respective local fitness centers, of course. He spends a sizeable portion of his time in internet cafes looking at places to buy in Silicon Valley (I might be ready to do that by September). When a Beach Boys tune comes on the radio, he turns it up and sings along. He suggested basically skipping the North Island of New Zealand, and I think he was serious.

OK, OK – it’s not quite as bad as all that, it’s more a travel-style sort of thing. I don’t mind packing up and moving on to a new place every day or two, the better for a change of scenery and the newness of the next thing. Brian would much rather stay put for at least several days at a time, if not weeks.  That's not a bad thing -- we've got good long stretches of visiting dear friends on our list for this year -- but that's not really travel to me, it's "going someplace."  It can be fabulous, it's just not the adventurous sort of travel I love.

I do need to remember that I had a lot of down-time in Singapore before taking off for this trip, while Brian worked up until the last minute. I get that he wants to veg out for a while.  But if this isn't the year to travel overland from Tunis to Algiers (or further!), I don't know when else we'll do it.

Brian's travel checklist also has a requirement for a nearby great gym, of course -- any locale without one is pretty far down on the list (somehow, I don't think the small towns between Tunis and Algiers will have fitness centers). If you know Brian, you know he doesn’t even consider a hilly 6-mile hike a day's workout, whereas when I travel I pretty much consider exploring a new town on foot for an hour or two enough physical activity for a day.

Then there's my focus on good food vs. Brian's focus on food that's good for him. Brian is pretty darn happy with a hostel-style kitchen, where the available spices run the gamut from salt to pepper. (We even stayed at one otherwise-fabulous place where we bought salt and donated it to the cause so they would at least have that.) Despite being a great cook in “real life,” he is happy to open a can of soup and pour it over some brown rice and call it dinner, but that's not my idea of actual food.  If I don’t have a normal range of pantry basics and some fresh vegetables, I’d much rather eat out.

Eating out of course requires choosing a restaurant, which I view as a major highlight of my day, and Brian considers a waste of time that could be better spent writing postcards (hmmm...any wonder the folks on his address list receive more postcards than mine do?). He’s not a fan of perusing the menu board of every restaurant in town before deciding where to eat, while according to me we’re simply on a leisurely stroll through town (see Physical Activity), with the added feature of reading about food. And really, I hardly ever make him do a second round of menu-reading before sitting down to eat.

So basically, Brian wants to work out more, eat healthier meals, spend less money on food, spend less time packing up, less time searching for a new hostel or hotel, and less time on the road. I guess maybe I should listen to him a bit?