Preparing for a trip is of a whole different order than actually going on it.  Preparing is nothing but feverish excitement and frenetic bouncy-ball skips from one possibility to the next.  In the trip-planning stage you move at ultra cyber-speed eating organic eggs and checking out vintage petticoats and petting urban goats and eating chicken tikka masala and nursing a Martini at Bond’s old haunts and photographing Victorian architecture all in the span of, say, three hours.  I have two free afternoons in London and about a year’s worth of gaping and roaming and eating and drinking and absorbing to do.

Backing up from the gush of overwhelming trip preparation, let me clarify that I’m headed to London and Scotland next week on a whirlwind jaunt set up for travel bloggers via Transatlanticism (a name that fortuitously recalls the name of the Death Cab For Cutie album I listened to religiously on buses crossing South America).  Three days in London, two in Glasgow and then woosh back to Ohio to pass out from exhaustion, cram myself full of one final smorgasbord of cheese and beer, and then hop another few flights back to Oaxaca.

So my package with Heathrow express tickets to Paddington station came in the mail on Friday and I sat fondling them lovingly in front of the fire, souvenirs infused with mesmerizing nostalgia before the trip has even taken place.  I am a sucker for little slips of paper from faraway places – or, less romantically, I’m an incurable pack rat.  I’m hording before the trip begins.

So that smooth, blue little ticket cemented it for me – yep, I’m going to London – and I threw myself into a fury of research.  Detaching myself from it – not a hard thing to do when you start to go bleary-eyed from so many maps and photos and websites and so much travel lingo (”a must” “vintage treasures” “unique decor” “classic British”) – I could see how a place begins to form in a traveler’s mind long before she gets there.

I can already feel London coalescing.  It is a vague hovering essence I’ve conjured out of the starched British street names on my printed map — Bloomsbury, Shaftesbury, Maryleborne, Torrignton, Tottenham, each with a ring so classically British it screams tea, tweed, red Telecom booths — attractions scribbled on my teeming itinerary (Petticoat Lane, Bourough Market, Tate Modern, Waterloo Pier Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre), photos of wood-hued British pubs with plates of pork belly and chips.

Of course, the real thing will be both the same and different, fleshed out by a combo of unexpected and thrillingly recognizable details.   I love the initial, alchemical moments when the research and planning meet the real thing.  Snap! – the nebulous swirling notions shape-shift into reality.  So THIS is what Petticoat Lane really is!

I remember when I bought a ticket to Lima in 2004 and had no idea, absolutely no idea, what to expect.  I planned and read and made notes after notes in my cheap drugstore notebooks, but on a certain level I never really expected anything to exist.  I just couldn’t imagine it.  I had no basis for evoking some image of Lima – I had all the simple travel phrases about colonial plazas and indigenous peoples but no experiential basis for it yet.

In the back of my mind, I believed that if I actually stumbled across the places I’d read about and carefully noted, it would be by some sort of miracle, a bizarre auspicious collision.  These “destinations” channeled via guidebooks and websites sounded so outrageous that I could only hope I’d actually find them.

But with each trip you get a wider sense of the possibilities – and, for better or worse, the mythic unimaginableness of places fades as your awareness of them, your chance encounters with Peruvians in Malay coffee shops or your teaching job with Australian colleagues in Japan or your brief trip to Morocco make more and more kinds of places seem not only conceivable but familiar.

And now I can mostly imagine a place before I go (except for Borneo – couldn’t really imagine Kota Kinabalu, which was what made it so great.  Looking for a place to travel during winter break in China, Jorge and I went online and searched for Air Asia’s destinations from Hong Kong.  We came to Kota Kinabalu.  “Where’s that?” Jorge asked, “Don’t know,” I said, “but it sounds tropical.”  We bought round-trip tickets for 80 bucks).

So mostly, now, the joy isn’t so much in discovering the distant and unknown places whose existence still seems incredulous, although that’s fantastic, too, but in seeing how a city in particular shapes up from the ruins of my initial expectations of it.

Beijing was extraordinary that way.  We read and read, The Insider’s Guide to Beijing, one of the best city guidebooks I’ve ever found, the LP (pathetic), and a million personal blogs with tips and preferences.  We found many recommended places, some great, some under-whelming, but the best thing was getting to know the city until we could say – “aha, it’s by Dongzhimen, okay, and if we go out exit C we’ll hit Dongzhimen Dajie on the left, so it’s right around the corner…”  Little by little the city oriented us to it and we could feel out how to navigate an area without having to research so much.   The research we did by the middle and the end of the year there was of a totally different type – it wasn’t the vital thumping nervous system of the city we were discovering, but the strange beauty marks, the little curves and wrinkles we’d missed or had yet to discover.

The whole process — the initial research, the emergence of the city from your maps and pre-conceived ideas, then the establishment of the city as a thriving but navigable creature whose energy you’ve grasped, and finally the intimate post-research stage of wanting to find out more and more about its nuances, details, buried pasts and secrets – fascinates me.  I see it taking shape for London.  And of course, I’m getting way ahead of myself, planning a year’s worth of city bonding in 2 days.

And I haven’t even started on Glasgow.

So as of yet, here is the vaguest outline of a London itinerary (apart from the formal, designated one) and the beginnings of the emergence of London in my mind:

Camden Markets :  A series of markets in a neighborhood with a former goth/punk lean and lingering anti-authority tendencies.  Major points for a ban on chain stores.  I was a little queasy at the description of Camden as a goth/punk hangout come “trendy” non-traditional destination, but more research has revealed whole areas devoted to goth stores, burlesque lingerie, and punk boots.  And the idea of a sprawling series of markets in old horse hospitals and stables, re-invigorated industrial locks and canals, and immigrant street markets is just too cool to pass up.  Definitely earmarked an afternoon here.

For Jorge, photo galleries:  The Honduras Street Gallery and The Photographers’ Gallery .  And of course the National Portrait Gallery and, if I can squeeze them in (which in my ideal I can-see-the-city-in-48-hours! plan I can do) the Tate Modern and the British Museum (scoff all you want, I know it’s damn near impossible to fit even one of those puppies into two free afternoons crammed with neighborhood exploration and ale-tasting.  But hey.  I can indulge in that dreamy phase for two days longer).

Shoreditch:  I’ll go on the lookout for the local species of Shoreditch Twat, and I’ll probably ending up joining their ranks temporarily by searching out some awesome Bangladeshi joint on Brick Lane.   In an ideal world I’d visit Spitafields City Farm and then the Old Spitafields antique market.

Then, if I mysteriously still have hours of time, I’ll stroll from the Tower of London along the Thames to Millennium Bridge, walk the Bankside Gardens to Waterloo Bridge and cross to the Somerset House, and then head up and meander through Covent Garden and Piccadilly.  That is, of course, after I’ve wandered for a few hours through Borough Market.

And finally, I’ll wash it all down with some fine British ale, sucked down in a pub with big platters of chips and fat pickles and some heaping gastropub burger while I lazily scrawl the spoils of my day into a weather-beaten notebook.  The end.