Never forget your iPod and dvd player during long trips.
The campaign trail can be super ephemeral in that you travel so long in a row that all the days kind of blur together, and it can be hard to lay down markers to remember where you were.
I travel a lot with work... to and from Cornwall and Bristol, so I find myself on lots of trains.
The worst thing about touring is the travel.
I love being new places and hate getting there, and have been known to say on multiple occasions that I would give anything from a piece of my soul to a limb to a portion of my life savings to teleport. Especially when bad weather keeps me off planes.
Traveling is difficult when you go for long stretches at a time, but you always come back refreshed, feeling that you've accomplished something. I'm on my knees before I go anywhere in this world.
I couldn't bear the road anymore. I'm sure that a lot of people who have been on the road a long time will say the same thing. After a while, waiting for bedroom service and planes - I wanted to go home.
But for every hour and a half on stage, you have a five hour long bus ride, waiting for five hours at the airport, five hours of interviews... I know, it's part of the job, but that doesn't imply I have to like it.
I've always been a Marvel fan. As a kid, I would pick up a two-foot stack of comics and read them in the back of my dad's car on long journeys across the States. That's how I used to make friends - I'd meet up with other kids, and we'd swap comics.
I chewed up a lot of Florida highway when I was starting out. Used to come to Tampa two or three times a year for about 10 years straight.
Today's baseball players are walking conglomerates. They have fantastic salaries, multiple investments, but we had one thing they don't have today, the train ride. We didn't always like it, but those rides kept us close as a team and as friends. Something you can't get on a two hour plane ride that used to take you fifteen hours on a train.
When you're on book tours, you definitely need chocolate. At all times.
I never understood the concept of a fluffy summer read. For me, summer reading means beaches, long train rides and layovers in foreign airports. All of which call for escaping into really long books.
We can travel longer, night and day, without losing our spirits than almost any persons we ever met.
A five-hour flight works out to three days and nights on land, by rail, from sea to shining sea. You can chalk off the hours on the back of the seat ahead. But seventy-some hours will not seem so long to you if you tell yourself first: This is where I am going to be for the rest of my natural life.
