For those of us who travel routinely, it can sometimes be mundane things that happen to us along our journey that get us excited. Or we create our own fun with little games we play with ourselves to get through the stress of travel (such as “if I leave this bottle of liquid hand lotion in my purse, will TSA spot it?” or “how many pennies can I leave in my pocket before I’ll ding?”).

In looking back at my countless travel days, there are many events that got me excited or made me smile, some so boring you may wonder if I have a life! So here I share –

Top 10 mundane things (Letterman-style) that make me a very happy traveler:

10. Having a fresh supply of bins brought to my security line just before it’s time to go through the belt.

9. Approaching the line at Starbucks on a Monday morning and I’m the only one in line.

8. Getting through security without having to take off my jacket.

7. Getting seated in my rental car and the mirrors are already at the right adjustment for me.

6. Finding that my rental car is in space 05 rather than space 795.

5. Watching as one of the skinniest people on the plane sits down next to me in the middle seat of coach.

4. Finding hotel slippers when I open the closet.

3. Having a new TSA line open up just as I’m approaching security.

2. Checking into a hotel that has in-room Starbucks coffee.

1. Finding a bathroom stall that actually has room for me and my luggage without the need for me to stand on the toilet seat to close the door. Yes, this one definitely makes me the happiest!

3 Reasons Why You Want to Use SeatGuru Before You Fly – Make sure you are booking the right seat on your next flight.

Top 7 Tips for Packing Your Suitcase – Be smart when you pack for your next trip.

Relationships and Travel: Top 5 Lessons Learned (Both Good and Bad) – Maintaining a relationship on the road isn’t easy. Carol offers a few anecdotes.

Travel Gem for March 1st – Double check your seat and flight info a few days before a flight. Departure times get adjusted and seats open up.

I’m Leaving My Husband … Again! -How Carol deals with leaving the husband at home every week.

It’s early morning, still dark outside, and I’m on my way to the airport again. I kiss my husband good-bye saying, “Call you tonight” as I run out the door with my luggage rolling behind me.

My busy workweek has begun. I’ll be at client offices through Thursday and then I head back home again. I keep extremely busy all week and the days go very fast – for me anyway.

While I talk with my husband every night, I am so busy with my schedule that I often forget what it’s like for him to be home alone. Though he travels frequently himself, I usually leave him on Monday and he heads downtown to his office.

In the evenings, I head to my hotel where I order a meal that someone else cooks. He returns to a house where the kitchen is quiet. He makes himself dinner and shares the time with our dog Toby at his feet.

He retreats to his home office in the evening, where we talk on the phone for an hour or more. He then heads off to a half-empty bed where he falls asleep next to my pillow. He wakes up and repeats this solo process each day until I arrive home at midnight late in the week.

He doesn’t say too much about my travel though I know that solitude bothers him. He’ll never ask me to stop traveling, but I know he’d love it if I did. He also knows that to stop the traveling would destroy my spirit as I love being on the road.

So we continue this ritual of me leaving him every week, counting the days and nights until I’m back home again and we can share a few days together.

I have probably left my husband over 500 times. Thank goodness he’s always happy to let me return again.

Objective: Looking for a first-class leadership position where I can utilize my well-rounded skills learned as a frequent flier.

Experience: Have flown on countless flights, both coach and first class.  Have slept in an incalculable number of beds, mostly alone.  Have driven a myriad of cars, primarily on the right-hand side of the road.  1985-present.

Skills:

Flexible:

• Able to maneuver a suitcase, laptop bag and coat into a tiny airport bathroom stall in seconds!

• Can figure out all the buttons and knobs in a rental car faster than a speeding bullet.

• Able to sleep just about anywhere — on a plane, on a rental car bus, on a airport chapel pew.

Can-Do Attitude:

• Expert at finding the last open space in a plane’s overhead bins for luggage. There is always room for one more bag!

• Go-getter in finding the least expensive airfares and hotel rates.

• Determined to accrue air miles or hotel points for every purchase made.

• Tenacious in filling 3 oz. bottles with favorite shampoo and conditioner.

Team Player:

• Gets out of the aisle quickly upon boarding to allow fellow passengers to get to their seats.

• Follows the rules for arm-rest sharing in coach class.

• Helps window-seat passengers pass the trash to flight attendants.

• Never slams back seat back into knees of passenger in next row; shares the precious few inches equally.

Prepared:

• Has enough food, reading material and music to survive several hours on the tarmac.

• Always has ID, credit card and boarding pass ready for quick entry into airline lounges.

• Ready to unload laptop, liquids, shoes and jacket into plastic bins to keep the security line moving.

• Always has $1’s and $5’s for tipping maids, porters, bell desk.

Communicator:

• Knows how to ask for a better seat or a better room.

• Always friendly to gate agents, security, hotel and car rental personnel.

• Skilled at asking parents to have their kids stop kicking the airline seat in front of them.

Organized:

• Expert at selecting a week’s worth of clothes, coordinating jewelry and shoes in 15 minutes or less and get it all in one carry-one bag.

• Maintains an up-to-date accounting of air miles, hotel points, car rental awards, credit card points.

Works Well Independently:

• Comfortable eating alone in a restaurant

• Can drive through cities and towns for hours on end  with only a GPS for companionship.

Intelligent:

• Knows the signs of a slow moving security line and is sometimes smart enough to avert it.

• Understands what the ‘ding-ding’ near the end of the flight indicates.

• Can whip out the perfect credit card for the situation to get the best award points.

• Knows to look for where the little arrow is pointing on a rental car’s fuel gauge before pulling up to a gas pump.

Tech Savvy:

• Expert on the best iPhone and Blackberry apps for travel

• Can Skype across the world

• Expert at online banking, online check-in and online everything.

Hobbies:  Staying home.  Enjoying time with family and friends.  Reading a great book that doesn’t have a ‘boarding pass’ bookmark.

Successful women business travelers:

We’re comfortable wearing many hats. We switch from being a wife and mom on Sunday to a traveling business woman on Monday morning rushing to the airport. It’s almost like we put on our super-woman cape as we leave our homes, as we must quickly switch into the work mindset, preparing for meetings and key tasks and appearing very professional and organized, even though we had kid dribble on us 24 hours earlier and didn’t have time to wash our hair.

We’re flexible. We prefer a first-class upgrade, but we’re happy as long as we have a seat on the plane (no middles, though!). We do not care if we have one king bed or two doubles, as long as the bed is clean. We can zip through airport security as if we had octopus arms and legs — we flip off the shoes, whip out the laptop and liquids, and throw off the jacket all while keeping the boarding pass visible. We can sleep sitting up or laying down.

We’re fast packers. We scan our closet, select a few mix-and-match outfits, grab matching jewelry, a pair of shoes, some personals, and our permanent travel makeup bag. We’re ready to go!

We’re patient. We don’t stress over long airport lines or heavy traffic. We use that time to enjoy our coffee, catch up on reading, or make phone calls. We know that we’ll get home eventually, so we don’t panic if there is a missed flight or a flight delay. Instead, we head to the airport lounge for assistance, and then enjoy a glass of wine while we wait our next flight.
We’re comfortable in our own skins. We eat in restaurants alone (ok, probably with a book), we drive long distances alone, and we’re comfortable being with just ourselves. We keep ourselves busy.

We’re practical. We have our packing so well down that we usually have just what we need. But if we forget an item, we ask the hotel for a replacement or we find a store. We do not sweat the small stuff.

We’re planners. We plan our travel days for easy on-and-off jackets and shoes. We plan our weekends in order to get the most accomplished and enjoyed.

We’re delegators. We realize that we can’t do everything, so we enlist the help of others. Yes, we may feel guilt in delegating, but we get over the guilt fast once we start enjoying the benefits.

Women business travelers who might want to rethink their choice and stay grounded

We’re overpackers. We bring more clothes than the number of days away, and with different shoes for every day. We tell friends we can’t go out the day before a business trip because we need to pack.

We’re always on the phone with home. We call the spouse and/or kids many times throughout the day as we don’t think they can manage without our overseeing everything.

We’re overextended on our finances. We must have an expense reimbursement before we can put another trip on our credit card.

We’re anxious about the weather. Weather.com is our homepage and we’re worrying about rain on Thursday when it’s only Monday.

We’re without a strong support system at home. We’re in a relationship without strong trust. (This indicates bigger issues than deciding whether to travel, which traveling probably won’t help.)

Her: Wow, how exciting to travel every week!
Me: I’d be excited to be home for awhile …. In fact, I’d be ecstatic to be home for just one week!  Two weeks at home and I’d probably never want to go back to work.

Her: You really must save on utilities, food, etc., right?

Me: Yes, but I pay for someone to clean the house, take care of the landscaping, clean the refrigerator after everything has turned green from my lack of being home… and I’d pay for even more services (grocery shopping, namely) if this was offered where I live.  And my husband is in the house whether I am or not, so the utilities are virtually the same whether I’m home or not.

Her: You must have a ton of air miles!
Me: Yes, but the last thing I want to do when I’m not traveling for work is to get on another plane!   And even when I do want to use air miles for an international or domestic flight, it’s virtually impossible to find the number of seats I want on the days I want to go.  So the miles keep accumulating.

Her: How fun to eat out all of the time … and have it paid for!
Me: Yes, I get to eat out at all kinds of restaurants.  However, I’d like nothing more than to stand at my kitchen counter and eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or mac-n-cheese.  And I really do enjoy cooking gourmet dinners for my family.  I can no longer stand the decisions on where to go for dinner while on the road.  I have too many more important things to do and think about to spend time on deciding where to eat.  So I usually end up eating at my hotel and eating one of just a few items on their menu that I can have made to order to be as healthy as possible.   And keeping the receipts to get it all into my expenses is a chore that ends up being done in my valuable home time over the weekend.

Her: You’re only here four days a week?  You get a long weekend every weekend?
Me: Yes, I’m only in my work-city four days a week, but I’m often in another city on the 5th day or working 10 hours from home on that day.   That leaves about 48 hours at home each week to spend quality time with my husband, talk with my kids, catch up on my sleep, connect with a friend now and then, go through the mail, pay the bills, grocery shop, cook enough meals to leave my husband dinners for the week, exercise, do my laundry, and on and on and on.   I only got into my pool three times last summer.  I never got to the beach even though Daytona is only 45 minutes away.  Yes, I could make the time, but then something else more important wouldn’t get done.   Maybe I’ll schedule a week or two of vacation just to stay at home and catch up on things and float in the pool with no internet connection or cell phone nearby 

She went back to her new computer at her new desk starting off on her new career.

I went back to my desk and thought about all the things I didn’t tell her:
That travel is now firmly in my blood and I can’t ever imagine not having a traveling job;
That I’ve seen cities and countries that I never would have seen had it not been for the business or vacation travel opportunities;
That I’ve made friends all over the country and even the world;
That I love the first-class upgrades, the concierge lounges at the hotels and the airline clubs at the airport;
That I love when my husband can meet me in any city on any weekend, as it doesn’t matter whether I travel back home or not at the end of a workweek;
That my daughter and I have a girls’ weekend a couple of times a year in different locales; and
That my job is always challenging and exciting due to the ever-changing work environments.

I had the same thoughts as she did back many years ago when I was in my early 20’s and I was working with a consultant who flew in each week to work at my company.   In fact, working with a traveling consultant is what got my interest going for a travel job.

If I could, would I have taken a different fork in the road now that I know all that I do about travel?  No…. I’d do it all over again.  Another day we’ll talk about the challenges of raising kids while being gone each week, but even with those tremendous challenges, I’d still be right where I am today – juggling my travel life with my personal life.

Your thoughts on the glamorous lives we lead?

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