With the ready availability of household help overseas, many of us don't have the satisfaction of completing a task together as a couple or as a family on a daily basis. Packout time gives us a chance to experience the joys and pains of working together.

Tasks that might have been burdensome in the past seem easy after completing a packout. Packing my suitcases for a trip was never one of my favorite tasks but, after a packout, it's child's play!

Joys of Moving: On the Trip

Traveling often involves bedding down with people we don't normally sleep with. Before critics start attacking my sense of morality, I wish to explain that I mean our children! I've enjoyed sharing a hotel bed with my daughter on more than one occasion. After she entered her teens, it was even better because if there is one thing teenagers do better than anything else, it is sleeping! I'd be in the wide-awake cycle of jet lag, and there was just nothing better than lying quietly with my sleeping daughter beside me.

Traveling gives us family time. Whether we're bedded down together in a hotel or sitting upright in the economy section of a plane, we're experiencing togetherness. When family members are awake on a plane, they become our captive audiences especially if the movie is dull. Before my daughter acquired my husband's ability to sleep while flying, she and I spent many a flight talking and laughing.

Traveling is particularly beneficial for housewives and househusbands because food arrives on trays--hot and ready to eat. As long as we don't have to prepare the meal or to oversee its preparation, we're happy.

Traveling can mean familiar things in unfamiliar places. I never found Christmas carols as stirring as I did in the Amsterdam Airport the Christmas Eve my daughter and I were traveling to my husband's Botswana assignment. I'd put Christmas on the back burner that year, but when the live band and singers performed, the tears rolled down my face.

Joys of Moving: Joys of Jet Lag

Sleep (when we get it) is never better. It may be only for three or four hours at a stretch, but it's often heavy, deep, almost dreamless sleep.

Romantic encounters in the wee hours of the morning can happen when two wide-awake spouses make the most of their time.

Joys of Moving: Sense of Renewal

We are given a clean slate much like the one we used to receive as students on the Tuesday after Labor Day. September often means a new beginning. We can have the joy of September whenever we move.

Joys of Moving: Help from Community

The foreign-service versions of welcome-wagon ladies abound. After a foreign-service move, they are often just what we need.

©2000 Hilary Donovan. All Rights Reserved.