There are so many things a person can burden themselves to worry about, when they travel. I'm not going to even pretend I'm immune to them. Though they don't all happen at once, I have experienced a number of very distinct kinds of worries and forms of anxiety when I've embarked upon long trips.
Having just gone on that very kind of voyage not long ago, I feel this is as good a time as any to document them for your convenience.
Some people will say they don't experience any misgivings or second thoughts, whatsoever, when travelling. Good for them, but I'm going to go ahead and say a lot of them are lying if they make such a claim.
Health-related:
Some of the most mind-racking sources of anxiety when travelling are related to health. Nothing like feeling poor physically to make rough an otherwise great vacation. The worry, alone, of facing that sort of outcome is troubling enough.
It can be a meal and maybe slight abdominal cramps afterward that seem, at the time, to be the harbingers of full-fledged food poisoning.
Maybe it's a dry cough and a chill that has the potential to be a cold that comes at literally the most inopportune time of the year. The latter, I am notorious for worrying about.
Vehicle-related:
Anxieties related to flights abound for many people. I’ve never experienced any direct fear of flying since I was five years old, but I still sympathize with those who fear flying.
Schedule issues, weather-related delays or even fears of missing one's flight abound in the time before a flight departs. Those are what get me.
I tend to occupy my mind with scenarios in which I forget my flight number or won’t get shuttled to the airport quickly enough to make my flight.
Another vehicle-related anxiety hits closer to home. I often start to doubt the capability of my vehicle when big trips are looming. Suddenly, the tires of my vehicle look "flatter than usual," or I start wondering "is it really that practical to wait so long until my next oil change?"
"How is my wheel alignment?" I'll ask myself. Sometimes, even when hitting a rough patch of road I'll puzzle over whether it’s, say, crappy asphalt on Highway 1 in Manitoba, or one of my tires about to screw up.
Domestic:
These are, by far, the most insidious of nagging worries that get under my skin when I travel. They aren't related to things or scenarios that await ahead of you—they are worries about what you may or may not have left behind. They are predicated on things that are most difficult to control, once your voyage is underway.
They can entail any number of little nagging potential problems around the home. Constantly asking yourself if you brought that present you intended to give to a relative, once you get home for Christmas, let’s say. Or, perhaps, a stubborn uncertainty as to whether or not you actually turned off the stove element on which you cooked breakfast.
The latter is one that always gets me. I once turned my car around at the half-hour mark of a trip to a friend's place in an adjacent province a couple of years ago, because of the unending doubt that I turned off a stove element near a very flammable wooden table covered in paper and books. Upon my return, I realized I had nothing to worry about; the only thing that was amiss was the bathroom fan I left running.
The most important thing about most of these worries and anxieties, at the end of the day, is that they’re usually completely baseless. I never caught anything worse than a hangover throughout my vacations – a pattern I hope continues into my future.
Usually the only thing my car ever needs on a long trip is a couple tanks of gas. The flight-related setbacks I’ve experienced are usually minimal and are limited to minor delays from the weather.
A lot of the time, the best remedy to these kinds of issues is to ignore them. There are enough things to think about when you travel, without entertaining worst-case scenarios, that in all likelihood, probably aren’t going to happen.
