Conference Travel

By the end of yesterday evening, I had memorized the 16 digits of my credit card, plus the three digit code on the back.

Five of the six times I typed it out were to pay for various aspects of a conference in the spring, so I haven’t become some kind of online supershopper (besides, those people wouldn’t be typing in their card number every time).

Rumor has it that our department suddenly has a lot of travel funds this year, so that we will be reimbursed for all of our conference travel, not just part of one conference, which has been the norm in the past. They won’t reimburse my husband’s travel, of course.

I don’t normally register for the conference, book a flight, rent a car, and reserve a room immediately after getting notice that my proposal’s been excepted, but we had problems with the hotel reservation for this conference last year because I waited until the last minute. I think I felt that arranging anything ahead of time would be jinxing the pregnancy (that was my trip at 34 weeks). The registration and hotel booking were also more complicated last year because of the location. (I don’t normally rent a car for a conference either, but there are some special circumstances.)

Mr. Luo needs a hotel with a fitness room to do his physical therapy. In the U.S., this isn’t such a problem, because you can get down to the level of someplace like the Comfort Inn and they’ll have a little room with an exercycle in it. For foreign conferences though, it means we need a fancy, modern hotel. No quaint converted monasteries. Twice we’ve stayed in places overseas without any fitness facilities and it did not work well for Mr. Luo.

On our recent trip, we stayed with his parents when we visited them, and in a fancy hotel when we went to see the other relatives. I don’t think about it much when I stay in a conference hotel, but I felt a bit guilty staying at an expensive hotel for personal travel (and no conference discount). We were in town for a very short time and had an early flight out, so I decided we should just stay by the airport. Due to a scary night in a Howard Johnson at Newark once when Continental stranded me, I decided that I would stay at nicer places for any future airport hotel sojourns. And I figured at some point, we’d be tired and have a tired baby and want to be able to eat in the hotel. So, I had my reasons, and my husband agreed, but it still seemed wasteful. I don’t think any of our parents would have stayed in at this hotel, even with an early flight and a baby. And shouldn’t buying a house make us more frugal?

At this point I am wondering if it would be less boring to write about my hair. And yet, I publish…