visit friends more often

We’ve just added two more friends to our list of friends who are traveling to D.C. for the post-Christmas/pre-New Year’s get together! That’s eight now! (True, it’s in association with a work-related event, but it will still be fun…).

Between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Right now, it looks like it will be at least four of us in D.C. We’re hoping for more!

It’s odd. I never think of visiting long-distance friends as a form of travel. I always think of traveling as going to new, exciting destinations. Or the reqular, required pilgrimages home to family. Or I think of travel as the (slightly) less mundane requirement of my job. But visiting friends? Somehow that doesn’t make it into the budget for travel plans.

Perhaps I’m worried that I’ll encroach upon their everyday lives. Maybe I’m anxious that the easy give-and-take will be gone. Or I might suspect that I’m no longer as fun-loving and easy-going as I used to be.

And then there’s the money. I’m broke. I shouldn’t be, but I am. Part of the way I dug out of debt was to cut money spend on traveling. And that somehow, in some warped logic, meant traveling to see friends was expendable. (Not going to movies, noooo. Not trips to the coffee shop. Not my magazine subscriptions. Visiting friends. What is wrong with me?)

But all of that—the arbitrary definitions of travel, the psychobabble of anxieties, the woe-is-me money whining-is so much less important than my friends. That’s why I need to make sure regular visits with my cross-country friends become a priority.