I’m pretty tied to my daily routine.  In the morning, I worship the Egyptian God Anubis through the use of ritual sacrifice, and follow it up by painting my body with multiple colors and rolling around my living room carpet in a burlap sack. I then go to work for my job as a hand model, and then spend most of the evening betting on cage matches featuring girl scouts in mortal combat with various sects of Amish.

I’m not proud of being such a creature of habit, but that’s just the way it is, so I have to be very careful when I’m planning for a vacation.  Such a disruption in daily routine requires studious attention to detail, and to make sure that all necessary precautions have been taken before I leave.  My checklist generally consists of the following:

Research the latest packing techniques. There are actually sites devoted to the proper packing of suitcases to maximize all available space, such as OneBag.com. I visit them, study the most current strategies, and then give up in disgust when I realize that I still can’t fit in my TIVO.

Be kind to your plants. They’re not getting water for a while, so be generous.  I don’t mean by excessive watering or talking to them or any of that hippy crap; sprinkle gin and tonic over them. Next to photosynthesis, there’s nothing they love more.

Manage your workload at the office. Specifically, start doing everything poorly--that way they won’t miss you when you’re gone, or expect you to do things when you come back.

Set your out of office message.  This is a corollary to the above step.  Most people make the mistake of setting an Outlook message along the lines of “I’m out of the office and won’t be back for two weeks.  Please leave a message.” Bad move.  If you do that, you’ll come back to five thousand emails that you’ll never get through or return. What you need to do is set a message that sounds as though you’re actually replying to whatever was sent: “Hey, stop emailing me. I tried to call you about the project and you weren’t around, so I told your boss that you’re an idiot.” After the first day or so, people will actually stop emailing you and you’ll come back to an empty inbox and several blissful, relaxing days at the office.

Read the travel guide. Study up on the history of the country you’re visiting--although give up when you realize it’s all Crusades this and Cromwell that, and go straight to the part where they tell you about the good pubs.

Practice phrases you’ll need. I don’t mean foreign language phrases; who has time for that?  Buy a Captain America T-Shirt and practice sentences such as “I’m from the U.S. of Goddamn A you communist, so don’t tell me the exchange rate is $100 for a single goddamn Euro.”

The best thing you can do after all that is to relax and let yourself open up to new experiences.  Go on hiking treks; observe strange and bizarre people; eat exotic and frightening food; drink with abandon.  And once you get off the plane, you can do some other things as well.