I’m more or less comfortably sitting in my sky chair, going from one side of the globe (California) to the other (Kuala Lumpur). As the crow flies it’s a fucking long ride. Different continent, different languages, different everything and far. That’s how I conceptualize travel.

I grew up packing snacks and loading up a station wagon to cross a state line. New Hampshire wasn’t even 100 miles a journey, I don’t think, but journey it was. A day could be set aside preparing and anticipating. However, if it weren’t for the signage, you really couldn’t tell you were somewhere different.

I yearned for travel as a kid. Plotted my escape from suburban torpor. Imagined exoticism, adventure. If asked at age 12 my retirement plans, I probably would have said a round-the-world ticket that never stops.

I’ve been places now past my wildest imagination. Safari in Africa, whitewater rafting the Nile, street food, temples, snake charmers and even a snake temple in Malaysia, shopping in Bangkok and Singapore, Edinburgh’s Fringe, punk bands in London, the tops of the Eiffel Tower, Empire State Building, the Golden Gate, and the Grand Canyon. Crunching snow underfoot in Yellowstone, and shooting guns in early summer outside of Yosemite.

It seems kind of fake to me, the one who couldn’t figure out the logistics from my bedroom daydreaming.

But, here’s the dark side of my experiencing some of my flightiest dreams. I am not a comfortable traveler. I ache with erratic sleep and temperature changes.

I never factored in dehydration and back pain while fantasizing.

Fortunately, I can eat pretty sturdily. I only have two gastrointestinal complaints in years of trekking. There was the incredibly tasty, succulent crab in Thailand that carried so much more. Nota bene: the public toilets in Bangkok are unparalleled in quantity and quality.

The less said of finding myself tangled in mosquito netting in a pitch black Ugandan night groping for the bathroom, the better.

But, where food is fine, sleep is elusive. It doesn’t arrive when it should, if ever. Even now, an almost 20 hour flight that took off at 1 a.m. to my body’s clock, sleep should have been a given. I dozed fitfully repositioning myself and never really getting to bliss for about 5 hours, and that unsatisfying stint was with the help of modern pharmacology.

Of course, a soupçon of the sleeplessness could be my hard-wired anxiety. We snagged the easy mobility and ample leg room of the emergency row. It’s a great perk — not only have I had room to do some stretches for my back, but we’re behind the galley and the bathroom. Plenty of water, and an extra snack and easy plotting for personal relief.

“But at what cost?” My brain says. Will I really be able to fulfill my promise to read and follow instructions and help evacuate the plan in the case of an actual emergency? Do I have the strength and dexterity to rip off the door and inflate the slides?

Who can sleep with that kind of pressure?

By the way, I’m wondering about the age of this flying vessel. There’s roughly a million built in ashtrays, on the bathroom doors inside and out, near the galley and around the sides. How the hell long has smoking been banned?

In hotels, sleep is much the same. I lay awake in the downiest of featherbed counting the hours until daybreak. (Back in the olden days when I might have occasion to visit strange beds, not sleeping was a great coping mechanism. I was up and out before the damage could be assessed, a ship sailing out of port and into the horizon before the dude knew what hit him.)

Maybe Morpheus will give me a little something something this trip.

Otherwise, if you ask me now to channel that 12-year-old’s view of retirement, travel dreams have gone to sleep. Now, retirement will be a cushy couch and a fluffy, warm blanket at home.