Traveling lends itself to thinking more about travel. I occupied my time on the plane flight to Tucson last week with the thought of the states I have not yet visited. The number is dwindling:

• Alabama
• Alaska
• Arkansas
• Hawaii
• Idaho
• Louisiana
• Minnesota*
• Mississippi
• Montana
• New Mexico
• North Dakota
• Oklahoma
• South Dakota
• Tennessee*
• Texas*

As you can see, I have a southern swath that needs to be taken care of sometime soon. Luckily the next eight months’ traveling schedule has me slated to visit Texas and Louisiana. San Antonio and New Orleans have long been on my list of places I’d like to see.

And other states on the list offer other gems. Tennessee has Nashville and Montana and Idaho have beautiful national parks. But can someone offer me an incentive to visit Mississippi or Minnesota or Oklahoma? I’m sure there are some, but none springs immediately to mind.

Now if only someone would schedule a conference I needed to attend in Hawaii…

*Airport layovers haven’t been included as official visits, since I never actually left the building. (States that I drove through but that offered no reason to get out of the car have been counted.)

This weekend will mark the fifth trip I have taken in six weeks — the UK, Pittsburgh, Massachusetts, Arizona, and Connecticut. I am tired. I don’t know how my folks managed a weekly commute of 600+ miles over the 14 years they did it.

I am looking forward to the three uninterrupted weeks I’ll be at home starting Monday and leading up to Thanksgiving. I’ll need to spend some time at home cleaning up the mess there following the flood-mandated remodeling. But there also will be time for reading and knitting and visiting with friends and movie watching and catching up on the tv shows Rudi has diligently been taping for me in my absence. We already have our tickets to see the new Harry Potter movie when it opens in a few weeks, and I can’t begin to say how excited I am at the prospect of it.

But before then, there’s one more trip ahead of me. Wish me luck…

Three beautiful things from the last week:

1) 85 degrees and sunny weather in Tucson for the three days I was there. It was nice to wear shorts one last time this year.

2) October shouldn’t be that warm, so it was nice to come home to golden leaves on the lawns and a nip in the air.

3) Min and I knew each other through mutual friends in college, where she was a couple years ahead of me. We had managed, for the most part, to stay in touch through the years, but time and distance make that challenging and we’d managed to lose track of each other in the last year or so. So it was nice when we made plans to meet up while I was visiting town. I think we both were a little worried that we’d changed since we’d last seen each other (we’re guessing it’s been about seven years) and that we wouldn’t recognize one another. But instead we did and I had a lovely time reminiscing and catching up and getting to know her better. Maybe the next time I come to Tucson will be a little bit more relaxed and I’ll have more opportunities for visiting.

I would write and fill you in on all the details of my trip to Tucson (you’ve been checking in regularly looking for them, right?), but I keep dozing off as I try to catch up on all my friends’ blogs. And it’s not because they’ve been writing about boring things.

Yesterday, Min (who is known to other people as something else) and I met up in the late afternoon and she drove me up into the Tucson Mountains and Saguoro National Monument West to see the cool trees and the vistas. I took a few photos, but was short on battery power, so we’ll have to see how they turned out. Then we went to a party. She has nice friends.

I got back to the hotel just before midnight and was in bed by one. And up again before five. And on the road half an hour later. I didn’t have to do any of the driving, but it’s still wearying.

And I deserve to be tired. It is, after all, 5 p.m. in Tucson.

So please tune in on Thursday when I promise to be awake and to reflect back further on my trip, Tucson, and Tusconites. Tusconians. Tucsoners. Yeah.

… if I wait until tomorrow morning to pack for my trip? My plane leaves at 10 a.m. from Baltimore. Do you think it will guarantee that I’ll oversleep?

Another work-related trip looms. This time to Tucson, Arizona, a city I’ve long wanted to visit. I mean, it’s a city with a silent “c” in its name — how can it not be cool?

One of the nice perks about traveling for work is that it affords you the ability to visit people you haven’t seen for a while, essentially on someone else’s dime. I suspect that’s part of the reason Pittsburgh doesn’t thrill me as a destination; I don’t know anyone there.

But in Tucson I have an old acquaintance from college, whom I haven’t seen in many years. (Please understand: “old” and “many” are relative terms here.) She’s pursuing (I think) a master’s degree at the university. I am headed to the university to think about health education with their library school folks.

So, a bit hesitantly, I dropped a line to this fellow Conn alum. I mean, it was a bit cheeky to email her out of the blue (she fell off my Christmas card list a few years back when I ran out of time to finish mailing them) just because I was headed to her town of residence. Would she object to being bothered? Would she think I was using her presence in town as a way to alleviate boredom while I was far from home? (A valid point, even if I was actually looking forward to seeing her.) Would she offer up a thin, but possibly legitimate excuse as to why she couldn’t see me? Would she bother to respond at all?

But today, a return email. She was pleased to hear I was coming to town. Did I need a ride from the airport? Should she knock off work early to hang out one afternoon? It was exactly the response I’d hoped for, but hadn’t dared to expect.

I overthink things sometime. I would be pleased if people I liked during my previous lifetimes looked me up when they came to D.C. Why shouldn’t others be equally happy if I do the same?