today i was talking to someone about her upcoming international vacation with her beau.  she said - he has bad travel karma and i have good travel karma.  usually my good outweighs his bad, so we should be fine.

later i was thinking about "bad travel karma" and what might have happened to that dude.  lost a bag? missed a flight?  sick on a plane?  man.

then i realized it.  WE have bad travel karma.  we have been stranded at a filthy airport hotel in panama.  we have missed a regional flight and had to drive cross country, in a foreign country.  i have held an infant with one hand and caught toddler puke in the other.  i have been to an international beach with no suitcase arriving and forced to shop at a gift shop to have something to wear other than what i wore on the plane.  i have been stranded in various states due to all sorts of weather, eric seems to lose a bag everytime he flies, adam gets motion sickness (as do i sometimes...). once we went to another country, to a remote place, only to discover that eric had packed one shirt.  for a week.  one.  by day three or four we were washing it in the shower and hanging it to dry. and marin... well she's too little for karma, but i'm sure we'll learn what her deal is soon (i just bought 9 separate plane tickets last night.  this is not a joke - 3 people in our family who need tickets x 3 flights =  insanity) maybe the scale is weighted a little because we HAVE to fly to see our families, but still.  bad travel karma.

but.

my point is that i never, ever noticed this until today.  and then i realized that this is how we do life - we don't focus too long on the challenges.  i have definitely complained right after the bad travel karma event, but i don't recall ever adding up all our challenges and thinking that things are bad for us.  in travel, and in our crazy life, we get curve balls so many times and plow on, look at what's good, and never (rarely...) look back.