Tag Archives: Travel

Giving Thanks for Crazy, Part I

I love my parents deeply, but I’ll be the first to admit, they can be crazy, and I mean CRAZY. Their maddening eccentricities often revolve around travel. My theory is that distance becomes less of an issue for people who leave behind their life in one country for another one that is literally on the other side of the world. My parents’ cavalier attitude towards long distances is legendary.

I would estimate that at least two thirds of my childhood was spent rolling around in the cargo area of my dad’s beloved Malibu station wagon. Every Sunday at the crack of dawn, we’d drive a couple hours from our little town in Pennsylvania to New York City for my dad’s preaching gig. Besides being the minister of a church, he also had a full-time professorship in Pennsylvania. He would nevertheless drive back into New York City several nights a week to work on another doctorate at the New School for Social Research. In all the free time he must have had at his disposal, he would cart us all across the country to visit far-flung friends and relatives. It was only when I got a little older that I realized this was not normal, but in fact, totally, completely, utterly: nuts.

Many years later, when I was grown and married and living in Charlottesville, I got a call from my mother announcing that my parents were going to drive down from Arlington to visit us. This rarely ever happens, so I was delighted to hear the news.

“We’re coming this afternoon! We’ll have dinner with you and head back home,” my mother announced to me over the phone.

“Really?! You’re going to drive five hours in one day just for dinner? Couldn’t you at least spend the night? Please?”

“Oh NO! We’ll be fine! We’ll just have dinner and go back!”

Besides being crazy, they are immune to reason, not to mention – stubborn as mules. There was no point in arguing any further. I would have to take what I could get.

They arrived and settled themselves on the couch. We bustled around getting dinner ready. Fifteen minutes after their arrival my mother stood up and said, “Well! It was so good to see you! We’ll be going now!”

There was nothing I could say or do to stop them from leaving. Believe me, I tried. No dinner. Fifteen minutes on the couch. And then those rolling stones rolled the two and a half hours right back to Arlington. See what I’m saying? CRAZY.

Come back tomorrow, because it gets even crazier…

Country Bumpkins

On Friday afternoon I pulled into the pick up line at Nicholas’ school and settled down to wait for him. Soon I spotted him running towards me with his gigantic backpack slung over his shoulder and a huge grin on his face.

“Rooooaaaad trip!” I whooped as he opened the car door and got in.

It’s been a rough month for us, replete with the usual heavy doses of teen and parental angst, handwringing and recriminations. School has been stressful and that stress has bled into our home life. Too many of our interactions lately have revolved around nagging and arguing about schoolwork. We were both glad to escape from all of that, if only for a weekend.

Once we established the happy fact that Nicholas would NOT be dragging his backpack to Wisconsin, we relaxed into the hour and a half drive to Richmond International Airport. This is the first year my son has been able to sit next to me in the passenger seat, rather than in one of the back seats. It felt great to be chatting side by side, at the very beginning of our trip to visit our friends.

Dinner at Richmond Airport

Dinner at Richmond Airport

We switched planes in Detroit. As we made our way to the gate, we passed through this tunnel:

“We seriously need to have one of these in our house. You have to take a video of this!” Nicholas insisted.

“You know what Grandma would say if she saw us videotaping this?” I asked Nicholas as I complied with his request.

“What would she say?” he asked.

“She’d call us a couple of chonoms.”

“What does that mean?”

“Chonom is Korean for country bumpkin.”

“She’d be totally right. We are a couple of chonoms getting all excited about the light show. Oooo! Now let’s videotape this fountain!”:

We finally arrived in Madison, bedraggled and exhausted from our travels, but so happy to see our friends waiting for us in the lobby.

More on our trip tomorrow…

We made it!

By the time we were about to leave for England, I felt like I had spent half a lifetime doing load after load of laundry, sorting through clothes, creating piles of things to pack, editing and re-editing those piles, writing up a hefty instruction manual for the small army of people taking care of our dogs, cleaning the house…I thought I was handling it all pretty well, but I must have been emitting serious stress vibes. As I was going about my business tying up loose ends before we actually headed to the airport, my son came to me and said in the soothing tones one would use when talking to a child about to have a tantrum, or a lunatic holding a lit stick of dynamite, “Mom…I know packing stresses you out, but could you please, please try to stay calm?”

It would have been a lot easier to, were it not for the incessant questions:

“So, when are we going to leave?”

“What time is our flight?”

“Are we almost ready to go?”

When my daughter started drumming her little hands on the kitchen counter, I lost it just a teensy tiny little bit:

“Please go sit quietly in the living room while I finish getting ready to go and don’t ask me any more questions!”

Other than running into the President at Dulles and getting my kidneys thrashed all the way across the Atlantic by the antsy toddler behind me kicking my seat, the trip was uneventful.

We made it to Hall Bank…

The boys were reunited at last:

Can you hear the swelling of the violins?

Seconds later…

The cousins were there waiting!

That first day the boys initiated their little sister into a sacred rite of passage that the children in our family undergo at the age of seven:

“I keep getting engulfed in panic!”
“Think, ‘Just keep peddling!'”

She was discouraged and exhausted:

But a week later:

She is now our third child to learn how to ride a bike at Granny and Granddad’s house.

The last time we were in England was four summers ago. This was the day my son learned how to ride on the very same bike:

It’s been wonderful to reconnect with family here, but I’m missing my family in the U.S. Yesterday was my father’s birthday and today is my mother’s. Sending happy birthday wishes from across the pond for the two very best parents and finest human beings I know. xoxoxo

Leaving today…

We are finally heading out to rejoin my husband and son in England today. My oldest son and daughter have been mooning around the house for more than a week missing their brother. My son, in particular, has surprised me by the depths of his melancholy. He keeps asking to see my phone so he can look at the photos of his brother my husband sent by text. I am reminded of when my oldest sister left for college. All that first year my mother would stare out the window as she washed the dishes, sighing mournfully with large tears trickling down her face.

“Is he missing me as much as I’m missing him?” he broods as he stares at the photos. Just in case, the other day he handed back my phone and said, “Here, take a picture of me to send to him.”

On Saturday after gazing wistfully once again at the photos we’d received so far, he started laboriously pecking away at the minuscule keyboard.

I’ve learned my lesson. Our time together is too short. We will never travel separately again, if we can help it.

And now, at long last, we are on our way! I’m looking forward to having the time to write at reasonable hours while we are away. (I winced a little when I realized the photo would reveal the embarrassing hours I tend to keep). I hope I’ll be able to send dispatches from England and Scotland. Until then, I hope every single day is wonderful!

Home on the Range

I’m a lousy traveler. Two Sundays ago, as I was about to head out the door to go to St. Louis for the conference I was attending, I collapsed in a pathetic heap on my foyer floor. “I don’t want to go,” I whimpered. As usual, I had made terrible packing decisions. Colin brought down a smaller bag for me, helped me repack my things more sensibly, and sent me on my way with a few reassuring words. Flying makes me nervous. I get lost all the time. Hotels give me the heebie jeebies. I’m always petrified that bedbugs are infesting my suitcase. I don’t like being away from my family for extended periods of time.

Once I was in St. Louis, everything was fine. I got to see a little bit of the city before the conference got under way. I heard inspiring plenary speeches by former Secretary General of the U.N. Kofi Annan and Dr. Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa, or “Dr. Q,” a neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins, who began his life in this country as an illegal immigrant tomato picker from Mexico. I attended sessions which gave me a renewed sense of purpose and mission. Most importantly, I rediscovered the heady, intoxicating, and hypnotic power of HGTV in my hotel room in the evenings. Although I’ve never tried it, I’m fairly certain that crack cocaine couldn’t possibly have anything on House Hunters International. I’m still having withdrawal symptoms.

On Friday as I headed back to the airport with my colleagues, the weather was looking ominous and I wasn’t at all confident that we were going to make it out of St. Louis. We managed to safely fly out before tornadoes shut down the airport. It was past midnight when I finally got home. What pure and unmitigated joy to peek into my children’s bedrooms and to see them fast asleep, and then to fall into my own bed for the first time in almost a week. For the first time in three weeks we’re all together, under one roof, and will be for another month and a half except for a few days here and there. Bliss.

I picked right up where I left off. It was a typical weekend. We went to the last soccer games of the season for the two youngest kids, a pool party, a graduation party, church…I did loads and loads of laundry. I nagged my kids to clean their rooms. I helped my daughter with her homework. But all of these ordinary events were burnished with a glow of comfort and familiarity. As I was driving back home from the airport late on Friday the song Home on the Range came into my head. This was one of four songs I would sing over and over to my oldest son on infinite loop back in the days when he was a sadistic baby who would torture his mother by refusing to ever sleep. It was a song I had grown tired of, having sung the same old tune night after night after night. This evening I sat on my deck and sang it again along with the sweet trill of the birds:

The Japanese Tea Garden

Just a couple more San Francisco posts…

The Japanese Tea Garden is one of my favorite places on earth.

The garden was originally created as a temporary exhibit for the California Midwinter International Exposition in 1894. At the conclusion of the expo, landscape architect Baron Makoto Hagiwara offered to create a permanent garden. He lovingly oversaw the garden’s design and building and became its official caretaker until his death in 1925. He and his family took up residence in the garden and he devoted all of his own personal wealth into expanding and developing it into a place of exquisite perfection. In 1942 Hagiwara’s family, who had continued to maintain the garden after his death, was forcibly relocated to an internment camp. They were never allowed to return to their home again.

You can have tea and snacks in the garden’s teahouse, where weekly tea ceremonies are performed. (The teahouse is the low building on the left.

There’s a gift shop right next door to the teahouse full of beautiful displays. These are chopstick rests:

 

The teeny tiny little Japanese woman in the shop must have taken ten minutes to wrap up my purchases with all sorts of embellishments. Tomorrow, I’ll show you what’s inside!

Enhanced by Zemanta