Winging It

Actually arrived in Seattle a bit early, even after leaving late. Give US Airways credit on that one.

Now a word about the bags (that's Seattle baggage claim in the photo).

Losing luggage on vacation is like catching the flu from a seat-mate, who kept sneezing and not covering his mouth as he spewed virus all over the Skymall catalogue page where you were wondering if there is anyone on Earth who actually would blow $129 on the Eastern Dragon Ring from the Captain Jack Sparrow collection. (And how creepy is that $229 tracking key that gives you a GPS reading on where your spouse is driving?) Like the lost-luggage department, the sneezer apologizes every time he inflicts his misery on you, but the wheels are inexorably in motion. You arrive alive and can still have a good time, but you're going to feel annoyed, look like hell and have to make an effort not to sink into why me? self-pity. It's only a very small comfort that there's a good chance that a lot of others on the plane are suffering along with you.

I obviously don't need luggage for this trip. But I had to make this interesting. So I packed two bags and put wrapped fake gifts in both. The gifts (expired toiletries from the back of the bathroom shelf) are there because I recently heard on a Today show segment that wrapped gifts have a way of getting "lost" en route. Inside one box, I wrote "thief" on a scrap of paper. The first bag is my husband's old, very decrepit bag that he has dragged, literally, around the world. It has some sentimental value, true, but it's like the old pink t-shirt he wore until the holes got big enough to aerate his entire shoulder blade. The time has come. And it might as well be sacrificed to a good cause.

To be honest, I don't think anyone would mess with that bag. It looks too pathetic for any sticky fingered baggage handler to want to search the contents for a robin's egg blue box containing something carated.

The second bag is the one I bought at Wal-Mart when UPS lost my daughter's duffel bag on the way to camp in upstate New York a few years ago and she needed us to bring her underwear and socks on visiting day. Somehow, there is a karmic justice in putting that one back in play.