About 7,000 of the 70,000 or so ‘burners,’ who attended the Burning Man festival in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert over the weekend started their journey home on Monday through Reno-Tahoe International Airport.

Another 10,000 or so festival goers are expected to head home via RNO on Tuesday.

To help make the transition from the playa to the plane as smooth as possible, Reno-Tahoe International added extra customer service staff, extra trash bins, therapy dogs and a Burner bike collection area.

The local Kiwanis Club cleans up and refurbishes the discarded bikes that were used at the fesival and distributes them to kids in the community.

Because dust from the playa can muck up the airport baggage system, Burners are asked to put their luggage into bins and/or big plastic bags.

“The day went extremely well,” said airport spokesman Brian Kulpin on Monday evening, “Stores and restaurants were full of Burners getting their first taste again of modern civilization. And airport custodial staff did a phenomenal job keeping up with the Playa dust and the exodus from the desert.”

Did you attend the Burning Man festival this year? Please share a photo.

2019 still seems far off, but it’s not too soon to pick out a few travel-themed paper calendars from the new crop of calendars already appearing in stores.

Workman Publishing surprised me with a few samples of the travel-related calendars from their 2019 catalog, including one from Atlas Obscura (which comes in both a wall and desk version) and a cool Islands page-a-day calendar and a few others.

It is tempting in these modern times to rely on the electronic calendars in our smart phones. But keep in mind that planners, page-a-day calendars and classic wall calendars with beautiful images of a favorite city you’ve been to, or of far-off places you’d like to visit, are a great way to ‘travel’ somewhere everyday.

The popularity of digital calendars has challenged paper calendar publishers like Workman to be more creative in designing and packaging these products.

“We do publish wall calendars differently than we used to,” Janet Harris, Publisher,Workman Calendars, said via email, “We’ve found that the more consumers rely on digital calendars for their day-to-day tasks, the more they want a wall calendar that is breathtakingly beautiful or irresistibly cute.”

I’m already thinking about and shopping for the planner I’ll use and the wall calendars I’ll hang up in my home and office in the new year. I know they’ll be travel-themed, but beyond that it’s going to be a tough decision.

Do you still use paper calendars? If so, how do you choose which ones to live with for the year?