The trip is always next year. Next year is better for it, there will be more money, work will be quieter, and the whole thing will be easier to organize from a position of not being quite so tired. This has now been true for several consecutive years.
The axolotls on this design did not wait. Little creatures in round space helmets, floating cheerfully between the planets, having apparently decided that the logistics would sort themselves out. Which, to be fair, they usually do.
Waiting feels responsible and mostly is not. The conditions rarely improve in the way we imagine, and the version of you with more time and fewer obligations never quite arrives on schedule. Meanwhile the years in which you were fit enough, curious enough and free enough to go are quietly being spent on the assumption that there will be better ones.
There will be other years, but they will not be this one, and this one is the only one currently available. That is not a warning, it is just arithmetic, and it points somewhere fairly cheerful.
Book the thing. Too early, with the wrong shoes and a plan full of holes. You will sort it out on the way.
