For once in my life I haven't left it to the last minute to book travel, so I actually managed to get some properly cheap flights.

I'm going to Holland the weekend of 24^th May. I'll arrive at teatime on Friday, and hopefully meet up with cartesiandaemon and spend Friday evening and Saturday touristing in Amsterdam. We hope to see rav_hadassah on Sunday, so that I can catch up with her properly before she goes off to be a rabbi in the wrong continent, and so I can introduce her to my beau. rav_hadassah, I know I'm in absolutely no position to talk, but could you answer my email so I can finalize the practical bits of this plan?

Then I'm coming to England for the weekend of 21^st June, which means missing Midsummer but I've experienced the quaint Swedish tradition twice now and I have important reasons to be in England that weekend, namely that my cousins are visiting from Australia. I will arrive Thursday evening and may come straight to the Carlton from the airport cos that was fun last time. I obviously want to spend some of Friday through Sunday with the cousins, depending on their plans, since that's the whole point! I might make it to Pembury on Sunday evening though, so I can see some of my London peeps. And if people want to see me they should let me know so I can fix things. I will have three full days in England, so it will be less ridiculously manic than some of my trips.

It's the Merton society weekend that weekend, which I could theoretically go to some of, but I dunno, cousins are priority of course. It's possible they might want to see Oxford, which is a good place for tourists.

I was feeling guilty that getting into a long distance relationship has pretty much destroyed all my good resolutions about flying. But to be fair, I've only made one gratuitous trip so far that I should blame the relationship for, and even then it was combined with Screwy's birthday. I would have gone home for Pesach anyway, and I definitely wouldn't want to miss my cousins as it might be years before I see them again. I could possibly have thought of travelling overland to Holland, if I were being less parsimonious with holiday time, but you know.

Now I need to sort out the summer. It's possible that I might try to get to north America some time this summer, but I don't know. It's been far too long since I saw rysmiel and darcydodo and compilerbitch and there are lots of other cool people out there. I was hoping to use the excuse of a conference in Quebec, but I haven't heard any news of the conference actually happening. There's a page in Google's cache suggesting it might be the first week in June, but the domain doesn't resolve currently, and if the info in the cached page is correct it's probably too late to apply. Without the conference, well, it's a lot of time and money and travelling, and I can't really kid myself that the whole of North America is all one place.

I want to spend some time in England at some stage, probably arranged around shreena's wedding. I think both darcydodo and hatam_soferet are going to be around, so I should definitely see them. A couple of weeks in England isn't at all hard to arrange, but it's a case of how it fits in with everything else. The other plan is travelling in Sweden a bit, possibly with my parents joining me for some or all of that. Again, not hard to arrange, but taking holiday in several short discontinuous bits might not be the most productive from a work point of view.

*sigh* I hate geography and logistics is on its side. But the overall conclusion is getting to see my friends, which is yayful.