Aitch has learned the word “journey.” He came out with it as we were reading his “Little Train” book. I had just turned to the page where Engineer Small and the little train were about to depart the Tiny Town station (get it? get it?) for the city when Aitch said, quite clearly, “Journey.” I did a double-take — “Where’d he learn that?” until I saw the caption: “The little train is going on a journey to the city.”

Funny that he memorized that. I’ve never emphasized the word “journey” — too abstract for a two-year-old, I would have thought. When we want to get across the concept that one of us is leaving on a trip, we say, “Mommy’s going on a plane,” a plane being something for which he has a mental construct. In fact, that’s what I said to him yesterday as I kissed him good-bye before leaving for the airport, and he whined a little and then said again, “Journey.” He was playing with his trains at the time and may have just been acting out the scene from the book; who knows?

And here I am, mid-journey. My meeting in Cancun has been relocated to a desert resort in the Southwest, where the probability of hurricanes is low. The hotel is nice in a resort-y kind of way. I have a suite with a wet bar, and I really feel like I should be out making new vacation friends and having them over for drinks, or something, but I’m too antisocial to waste time schmoozing people I’ll never see again. The truth is I don’t even want to make small talk with people when I’m on a business trip.

I have, though, started trying to make trips worthwhile in some way — journeys, if you will, rather than transfers from airport lounge to conference room to chain restaurant to hotel bed. There is so much time on a trip; I like to see if I can steal some of it to do something educational or stimulating.

Yesterday I had a nice big free chunk of time after I came in from the airport. I decided to go for a hike in the nature preserve that abuts the resort. The foothills were craggy and rocky and lined with actual cacti. The weather was warm, but not stifling, and so dry, which I love. So good for the hair! For a change I looked like a Breck girl while exercising, instead of Bozo. I hiked for about an hour, picking my way around the rocks and the different varieties of animal scat on the trail. Then it occurred to me for the second time in a week: This would be a likely spot to run into a coyote.

Well, I didn’t see a coyote, but I did surprise two very large…sort of upright……jackrabbity things with ears that stuck straight up. As with the deer earlier this week, I was concentrating too hard on my footing to get a good look. Once again I was disappointed in my powers of observation. If the next bit of fauna I encounter mugs me, I’ll never be able to pick it out of a lineup.

Later that evening, I got a pedicure and asked the technician if she knew of any local animals that looked like black upright jackrabbits with ears sticking straight up. She thought for a minute and said, “No, the only animal I’ve heard of being spotted around here is a coyote. Are you sure it wasn’t a coyote?”

When I returned to my hotel room I Googled it up: Definitely not a coyote.)