I found some travel tips among my catch-all notes that might be useful to pass on in this season of holiday travel.

First, tips from a book by Mark Lawson, The Battle for Room Service: Journeys to All the Safe Places (1993), with advice that might make you think of Anne Tyler's novel, The Accidental Tourist (1985). The protagonist, you may remember (Macon O'Leary, I think - I'll have to check: I did. The name is Leary, not O'Leary. Not bad for a book I read almost 3 decades ago.) Anyway, he made his living as a travel guide, advising people of places to go that are Just Like Home (J LH). Some people really don't went travel to be broadening; it's too threatening.

Lawson advises you to decide how much physical activity you want. I notice that the ElderTreks travel brochure breaks activity down into several categories from easy to moderate to strenuous, or the equivalent thereof. It never uses the term "Couch Potato" but CPs get the message.

Walk around the plane. Here's a statistic I never read before: The full distance from nose to tail and back on a 747 is about 400 feet. Thirteen times - your fellow passengers will love you - and you've covered a mile. Now have a Bloody Mary (my advice, not his).

This is not on Lawson's list, that I know of, but I remember reading that the Duke of Edinburgh advised travellers to "tinkle when you get the chance." (It could only have been the Duke of Edinburgh.) Because you never know. The same is true of napping. Lie down when you can. This is the best treatment for jet lag that I know.

Here's one I never thought of: send a postcard home to yourself. I'm not sure why. Maybe just to see how long it takes. Well, you already know how I feel about postcards.

This is the best one: take a magnifying glass with you, not just your magnifying spectacles and not just for reading the small print. You can really look at things, like lichens and mosses, for example. SOW, did you know there are 100 different kinds of lichens in that neat little ravine in northern Ontario? I forget the name (not Leary), and I'll have to look it up. I've long since despaired of any of you out there helping me. That's okay.

Perhaps we should talk about picnics next.

I just came upon a treasure trove of potential blogs, on scraps of paper and clippings I had stashed away: here a stash, there a stash, everywhere a stash stash. (How can anyone love EVERNOTE or STICKY NOTES the way I love my bits and pieces?) Blogs were still in my future, I just didn't know it. Pick one....

Okay, heres' one suitable for vacation time. (You have noticed, I am sure, that Americans say vacation while Canadians say holidays.) Postcards. Well, I have a little to say about postcards. I buy them when I am on a trip but I do not mail them. I buy them and tape them into my daily journal/diary/travel record, first because I do not take pictures and second, because the photographs are better than any I see being taken around me and third, because I am not in them. The last thing I want to see when I return home is a picture of me grinning beside someone whose name I can't remember -or never learned, more likely - obscuring the view of a wonder of nature or an achievement of mankind.

I knew a man who bought postcards with a dedicated and indefatigable devotion and who also never mailed them. He was a packrat, and his packratting eventually paid off. Later in life as he was eking out his life as a writer (we all eke), he created coffee table books out of his divers collections. His postcards book, dating back several decades, was delightful. I thought of him when I saw The Forty-Year-Old Virgin in which the title character sold his collections of (still wrapped) action toys and made a fortune. Unmailed postcards, too, can be valuable.

Then I think of all the clichés written in postcards and I cringe, writhe and grimace. "Having a wonderful time. Wish you were her." (sic) Why not say, "I hate it here." I remember a postcard my brother wrote the first time he went reluctantly to summer camp.

"Alone/Park Bench/Camp Obliquity (I made up the name). Having a terrible time. When can I come home?"

Well, self-pity can be funny but ordeals have to be lived through before they can acquire a patina of nostalgia and a wash of humour.

And that's all I have to say about postcards. All my note said was "Discuss Postcards."