How to avoid the last minute pre-travel crunch

I'm not sure I can follow up to that statement. Is there a way to avoid it? Perhaps if one does not watch episodes of Buffy at night instead of working on one's pre-travel arrangements. Or perhaps if one does not decide suddenly two days before leaving to cut one's hair. Or maybe if one does not spend 20 minutes fiddling around with one's blog. Then again, maybe it wouldn't make a difference at all. Am I destined to rush at the last minute? Maybe I'm jumping the gun. I do still have 48 hours...or so. I'm not in the crunch just yet. There may be hope.

Okay, so what's the deal, Pam? Back to Africa AGAIN? Yes, well, it is my fave place to go after all. This time it's super duper multifaceted. Here's the lowdown:

June 7 - Leave for Nairobi via Amsterdam (I'm really excited to visit a new airport! New to me, that is.)
June 8 - Arrive in Nairobi and get picked up by my friend Emmanuel. He'll take me to the Impala Hotel where I will stay for at least one night, maybe more. It depends on whether or not there is space in the apartment kept by one of my professors. His name is Jack. I may mention him again. I'm crossing my fingers that there is space!
June 9 - Go to the museum and hope like hell that they will accept my little proposal to look at hominin and monkey fossils for a few days.
June 17 - The field school starts. This time I'm teaching. (I almost said "this time it's personal"...but decided it would be too dorky.) Last time I was a student in this field school (the Koobi Fora Field School), and now I get to be a bigshot TA. Woohoo! I'm not being sarcastic. I really am excited. I love to mold young minds. Or old ones. Whichever.
June 18 - We travel to the Laikipia region for the ecology portion of the learning fun.
June 24 - We travel further north for the fossil/stone tool and semi-desert extreme hotness portion of the learning fun.
July 26 - We arrive at Lake Naivasha (I hope) and immerse ourselves the wonderful food, alcohol and warm showers.
July 27 - We get back to Nairobi and chill out at the famed restaurant Carnivore and dance the night away.
But wait...there's more!
July 29 - My buddy Andrew and I head to Tanzania and get to hang out at Olduvai Gorge with my advisor, Rob for about 2 weeks!
August 18 - I attend a conference in Arusha, Tanzania with a bunch of other "bone and stone" heads to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of "Zinj". Zinj is short for Zinjanthropus boisei, the first hominin fossil found in East Africa. Pretty cool. It's not called Zinjanthropus anymore though because they changed the genus name to Australopithecus, although some of us prefer to use Paranthropus...I won't bore you with the taxonomic details. Anyway, the site where Zinj was found is full of bones and stones (tools, I mean) and people have been arguing about the significance of it for ages so I fully expect a good old brawl at some point.
August 23 - I head home to my sweetie and my kitty cat (who is currently resting her little head on my laptop...no matter how many times I kick her off she always comes back).

So that's the plan. It will not go off without a hitch. It never ever does. So I'm sure there will be plenty to chat about very soon.

Until then...