The Utmost Respect

I think I have gained a newfound respect for my Mum. Not that I don't have respect for her. There are a lot of things about my Mum that I truly admire. I guess in this case, it's more of an unsung hero kind of thing.

I have, in recent years, gone on three significant travel trips, Belize, Peru and New Zealand - all, as it turned out, with my parents and sister. We all wanted to go to these places so we thought, heck why not just go together. So we did.

When planning for the Belize trip, I just left it up to my Mum, because I was about eight when we lived there and remembered very little about the place, so I figured if a trip down memory lane was planned, I'd better leave the planning to those with the memory of said lane. So Mum planned the trip and we had a great trip. She came prepared with maps, details of each town we were staying in, where we could possibly go and what we could possibly see. It was a fantastic trip!

Peru, we went with a guided tour group, so all the planning was left up to a third party - which was, for the most part, acceptable. Though there were a couple of times when we would have liked to strike out on our own. Even with the guided tour, Mum still came prepared with write ups on all the places we were going and maps of the ones that we were going to have some "independent exploration" time in.

Our last trip was to New Zealand, for which I did a little reading and flipping through of travel brochures to get an idea of the places and things I wanted to see. Again, the lion's share of the planning was left to my Mum, who, once again, came up with an Itinerary that we would all follow, found the accommodations we would stay in and once again, showed up with maps and write ups on every single stop on our trip. Everyday she would pull out the appropriate pieces of paper and say - "these are our options for today". The trip was great! Once again Mum's plans were ideal. And I don't think I ever told her how much I really appreciated her pre-planning and effort.

I have gained a new appreciation for how hard it is to come up with such a plan and I can't help thinking my Mum possesses skills far beyond that of mere mortals like myself.

You see, I want to go to the UK for six weeks this summer. I want to see bits of Scotland, England, Wales, Ireland and N.Ireland. And really, that's almost as much as I have managed to plan thus far. The "bits" have not yet been researched, the itinerary is vague at best and I have to somehow combine and accommodate (if you pardon the word) four people's schedules and four different arrival and departure times and places while avoiding being certain places on certain days but managing to be in others on other days.

It has left me all a bit overwhelmed and so I blog about it instead of working on it because it is, by far, easier to write about how hard it is to plan it than it is to, well, plan the thing.

So I sit in C's living room - where I can't possibly procrastinate from the task at hand - surrounded by maps of the UK and cuttings from brochures and copies of the months of May and June with various place names pencilled in on various days - feeling that I never gave my mum enough praise for all the hard work she's done over the years for the trips we have taken.

So to my Mum I want to say officially - THANK YOU for all the trips you have planned, all your hard work and all the planning you did made the trips fun and easy for me and I hope you don't feel taken advantage of. You are an awesome person!

...and to C - I'm sorry - it was awesome of you to suggest I work here by way of preventing my procrastination but, apparently, I can still procrastinate no matter where I am - what can I say - it's a gift - and alas, it's not what I had planned to do this afternoon.