Here’s the problem with Thanksgiving: Unless you’re the host, you have to travel.

If you’re lucky, you won’t have to spend nine hours on the tarmac with overflowing toilets and no food. (As if you would want to eat food next to an overflowing toilet. Mmmmm, yummy, peanuts!)

If you’re lucky, you won’t have to sleep on the concourse floor at O’Hare because there was a thunderstorm in Atlanta or Houston or Minneapolis. If you’re lucky, you won’t spend two hours standing at the luggage carousel before realizing that your bags are never coming out of that little door with the plastic flaps and that you could have left the airport two hours ago, but because you waited they canceled your rental car reservation and now you’re seeing if you can share a $100 cab ride with someone.

If you’re lucky, your plane won’t have to land at a different airport so authorities can arrest the drunken air-rage passenger who tried to open an emergency door at 30,000 feet.

If you’re lucky, you won’t be on the crying, screaming baby flight with parents who pretend the kids aren’t theirs.

If you’re lucky, you’ll be stuck in the traffic jam caused when two texting drivers hit each other head-on for only four hours instead of six.

But traveling is not the worst part of Thanksgiving. The worst part is when you finally arrive and you catch up with the family and you see all the baby pictures and you meet all the new boyfriends and girlfriends and find out how everyone’s job (or lack of one) is going, and you’ve had some laughs and you think, “That was nice; I’m glad I got to see everyone and now it’s time to go,” and you look at your watch and realize you’ve been home only three hours and there are three more days before you can leave. That’s when it hits you that you’ve made a terrible, terrible mistake.