This time Saturday we’ll be finishing up a three-hour stopover at New York’s JFK (where we’d been thinking about figuring out a way to catch a taxi from the airport to the Empire State Building and back but probably aren’t going to risk it) and getting set to jet the Atlantic to Venice and begin our two week vacation there before getting on this ship and making an eight-day run around the areas’ various rivieras (say that three times fast) and their respective ports o’ call.

To say Susan is ready to go is an understatement. Her clothes all picked out and I think she’s test packed the new luggage she ordered months ago. Plus she’s battened down all the trip’s details.  She even pre-bought our tickets for the bullet train from Monte Carlo to Paris after the cruise ends, and hooked us up with a bag o’ euros and double-checked our boarding passes and itinerary and excursions. She’s immersed herself in travel books about Rome and Venice and Paris and knows where we’re gonna go and what we’re gonna do.

Me, I could barely find Paris on a map of France (seriously, I thought it was centrally located in the country). And I’m woefully behind logistically. I did have the Canon Digital Rebel camera cleaned, and I had the pants of my tux taken in and the jacket pressed and purchased a new tux shirt this past weekend. But my Sharper Image garment bag (last used in 1996) remains somewhere hopefully intact in the basement, and I have no real idea what other clothes I’m going to be putting in it, much less the various electronic components, converters, chargers, et cetera we’ll be needing.

Oh I did manage to rig the broken camera bag shoulder strap so we didn’t have to buy a new one. Hey, that’s something.

But not bloody much and it’s way past high-time to get my ass in gear on the matter because this trip is the most varied we’ve been on, clothes-wise. Africa was all about stuffing a single duffel with everything we might need. The trip last summer across all those western United States was also very simple — even better, our base of operations was a rental car.

This time around we’ve got formal dinners at sea and hotel rooms and and staterooms and locations that will require me on occasion at least make a passing attempt at pretending I have some sort of style. Jackets and sports coats and ties and dress shoes and pocket squares and bow ties.

Sure a lot of the sight-seeing will be walk-about casual, but it all requires coordination and as much as I wish it would happen my bags ain’t gonna pack themselves. So the onus is squarely on me to crack the whip and to do so in such a way as to leave myself time to get the house cleaned up and make sure we leave the pet-sitter fully stocked with animal food and treats — and most importantly have the time for some night group bike riding on both Thursday with the IAAL/MAF and the highly anticpated RIDE-Arc ride Friday.

In other words it is patently intrinsic upon me to get a move on!