Freaking Out on the Inside

I've probably mentioned a few times in the past that I'm not a fan of traveling by air.  When Bryan has a business trip that involves flying I spend days before his departure and the entire time he's gone worried about him having to fly.  I've always been like this when it comes to planes.  When I was a kid, my parents would try to quickly shush my never a whisper voice when I'd sit on a plane before takeoff and ask if we were going to crash.  It's just who I am.  I worry about these things, because I feel like any flight involves a certain amount of risk.  So here I am, nearly eleven years after the last time I flew anywhere freaking out and having intermittent panic attacks because Bryan, the kids and I are getting set to fly out to California.

I don't do particularly well on the two hour flight from Philadelphia to Orlando, so I can only imagine what the five hour flight from Philadelphia to San Diego will be like.  I think my fear of flying is mostly linked to my motion sickness.  The thought of willingly putting myself through several hours of nausea where I have no way of stopping for fresh air or a few minutes of solid ground beneath my feet is pretty unsettling.  The lack of control over my circumstances is concerning to say the least.  And as much as I'd like to just call the whole trip off, I know I can't.  The kids are excited about going, Bryan is probably still in some state of shock that I agreed (even if only very reluctantly) to go out there, and one of my best friends was just so surprised that I'm flying out there that she and her husband have set us up with tickets to Disneyland for two days as well as a VIP tour guide for one day.  So while I'm totally dreading the flights, I am excited about the things we'll get to do and see while we are there.

I'm spending a lot of time these days just trying to distract myself with things that are keeping me busy so I spend less time fretting about the flight.  I'm trying to make sure we're packing the essentials that we'll need while we're out there.  We have a tendency to overpack in a big way, so I'm trying to focus on going out there as slimmed down as possible.  So far I think I'm doing this right.  Of course, the moments where I start to feel like I'm going to have a panic attack when my mind goes back to why I'm packing have been keeping me from getting the job done.  But, I'm almost done.

We're already in our second week of homeschooling for the new school year, and initially I thought we'd just leave all the work behind while we went away, but seeing how quickly the girls have been getting through most of their work, I've decided to put together packets for each of them so we don't have to completely lose a week of school.  Bryan assures us that with the time difference, we will have several mornings where we wake up and it's still going to be the wee hours of the morning on the west coast, so I figure having some work with us will give the girls something productive to do in those instances.  I also imagine they can get some work done on the plane.

This is the first time the kids and I will be going to California, so we're looking forward to being tourists for a week.  Bryan keeps telling me that I have to see what it's like to have the ocean on the wrong side.  That should be interesting.  I'm looking forward to visiting a couple of the old Spanish mission churches.  There are two near where we will be staying so I'm planning to visit each of them.

We'll be in the San Diego area so if any of you have any suggestions for places we should visit leave me a comment.  I'm not too familiar with what's out there.  Are there some great historical sites that we should visit?  Is there a particular beach we should check out?  Someone recently mentioned that there was some great shrine out there but she couldn't recall the name of it.

I'm doing my best to approach this trip as calmly as I can so I don't freak out the kids with my fear of flying too much.  To me it feels like a crazy trust exercise with God.  So on Saturday I'm going to do my best to offer up all my worries and fears and just lean on Our Lord to get me to the other side.  So do me a favor, offer up a prayer on Saturday morning and the following Saturday morning, as well, that our flights will be on time, and uneventful.

I will do my best to share lots of pictures of our trip.  I need to get back to blogging.