Travel is fun but takes its toll

Humans were not made, I'm convinced, for frequent, rapid travel, but it's what most of us do on a regular basis. 

Most people are familiar with "jet lag," the difficulty one's brain and body have in adjusting to changes in time zones. You might be in Hawaii or France, but your body and brain are still on Eastern Standard Time. The "Jet Age" (a term that seems quaint more than a half century since it was coined) is not the only cause for human problems with travel.

I recently returned from four days and nights in the North Carolina mountains. I love the mountains and take vacations and short trips there regularly, but I realized as I returned home (some 300 miles away from our mountain rental) that I was a little discombobulated. I had spent four days getting accustomed to the layout of the rental house, the light switches, the path to the bathroom and the kitchen, the deck with the long view of mountain peaks, the furniture, the companions (my wife, daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren) with whom I shared that space. I had to shake my head briskly to remind myself that I was no longer in that mountain cottage but back in the eastern North Carolina home where I've lived for 15 years.

Adjusting and readjusting is no crisis, but it does affect one's equilibrium and sense of place. On trips, we get accustomed to going out to eat more frequently than we do at home. There is no pressure to clean the house or do yard work when you're hundreds of miles away in a rental house that belongs to someone else. Going home is a return to reality, a reality we had ignored for several days. Getting back onto the reality path takes a little adjusting.

Air travel has its own set of adjustments to be made, from packing to meet the stringent TSA security requirements to sitting for hours in a tightly packed seat in an aluminum tube filled with strangers. But car travel affects one's body and mind, too.

There are few things more exhausting than driving for several hours in heavy traffic at 60 or 70 mph. The tension builds as cars and trucks jam the travel lanes, and, as driver, you are required to pay close attention to your speed, the vehicles on your left and right, as well as far ahead of you. You also have to be cognizant of your next stop or your next turn. When you're going 70 mph (103 feet per second!), you need advance warning of maneuvers that need to be made to reach your destination. All of this effort and tension is draining on the driver's mind and body.

If your itinerary includes several overnight stops over a several-day period, expect all the roads, all the restaurants and all the motels to run together into a confusing soup of flavors, sights and places.

Tension and stress limit the endurance of drivers. Long-haul truckers have regulatory limits on the number of hours they can drive. I have my own limits. I'm good for about four hours on the highway; then, I'm ready for a rest. I might make it five hours if I have to, but when we plan long trips, we try to break up the trip into digestible four-hour (or less) portions.

These portions do not eliminate travel's discombobulation and need for solid rest, but it does make the long-distance travel our prehistoric ancestors were never designed for more achievable.