It takes a long time and many miles to get away from the tramlines, and then you have to establish the lifelines. I think of Alvin Toffler's Future Shock when I travel, perhaps not in the way that he intended. Simplified, his message was with too much change in too little time, beware of information overload. I applied his advice when I was travelling a lot with a new book each year and when even modest, obscure writers like me were treated to the Book Tour to publicize one's effort. Such a tour is not travel as such, it's a kind of obstacle course. The if-this-is-Edmonton-it-must-be-Tuesday schedule reduces Canada to a series of plane rides and television studios and presents a challenge to someone who has a horror of repeating herself. You'd think with an attitude like that daily change would be welcome, but it's not when it's too rapid and inexorable. As Emerson said, roughly, wherever you go you take you with you, and in a situation like this, that is, cross-Canada travel on speed, you're lucky if you do. So, I thank Toffler (I think I developed this from Toffler's suggestions) because I take my familiar routine with me as much as I can. Of course, I can't get up and swim everywhere, unless I'm in a hotel, but I can have tea in bed and write and sort out the tramlines to be dealt with each day. Or lifelines. See - back to where I started! Establish your baseline (another line) with the familiar and you're set to absorb, assimilate and proceed with the new. So there you are, here I am, back to the blog, back to a wifi that lets me take me with me. Change is good.