books & travel

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Blue Nights
By Joan Didion

“We toasted Gerry and Quintana at St. John the Divine and a few hours later, in their absence, at a Chinese restaurant on West Sixty-Fifth Street with my brother and his family, we toasted Gerry and Quintana again. We wished them happiness, we wished them health, we wished them love and luck and beautiful children. On that wedding day, July 26, 2003, we could see no reason to think that such ordinary blessings would not come their way.

Do notice: we still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as ‘ordinary blessings.’ “

*pictures taken during a weekend trip to a bed and breakfast outside Madison, Wisconsin, in summer 2011. You can view more of my pictures from that weekend here, and after that you can read more about our experience being the only young people  (and, at times, the only sober guests) in this article for Vagabundo Magazine.

More books & travel:
The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway
Excerpts from “Your Feet,” by Pablo Neruda
An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, by P.D. James

How to Rule at a Milwaukee Road Trip

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Step 1: Stock up on supplies. There isn’t really anything that you can’t love about this landmark: Mars (probably our future home), Cheese (Cheese.), and Castle (CASTLE.)

Step 2: Build up your strength by only eating food that already resembles one of your organs.

Step 3: Take a brewery tour with a family of drunks and their loyal blow-up doll. Bonus points if your tour leader is a tattooed grade school teacher with a beer belly.  (Step 3.5: Take a really bad picture of it)

Step 4: Scalp tickets to a Bucks game. Add scalping to the list of illegal things that you know you could never pull off with a straight face. Realize that boyf is alarmingly good at scalping, so good that you begin to develop an elaborate theory that maybe he once led a past life of crime, or of poverty and intrigue, similar to that of Don Draper but hopefully not involving anyone’s death or war.

Step 5: Catch one of those XXXL shirts they throw! And by ‘catch’ I actually mean ‘realize that people are frantically running in your direction and staring at the spot on the floor next to your seat, then realize that a shirt landed there, then grab it as dozens of children who actually follow the Bucks’ career stare longingly at you, dreams crushed.’

Step 6: Go get frozen custard at an amazing 50s-style drive in. Try to take pictures of it, but the darkness is too much for Instagram.

Step 7: Breakfast the next morning at a cafe by the water. Make really bad puns about the word “parfait” after taking this picture. Fail to mention that you will be posting this on the Internet.

Step 8: Drink these and eat those while watching a flash thunderstorm begin and end within about 15 minutes. Decide that Milwaukee was fun but your car probably can’t survive another such thunderstorm. Make your ever-graceful exit.


Milwaukee, 2012.

A Rebuttal to all of the “This place where I’m traveling is so awesome” Posts

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I’m not currently in the middle of traveling anywhere. I’m at home. Normally this would really depress me, but my home situation is actually really adorable right now (just to give you an idea: I am currently sitting on my orange velvet couch. Yes.). I have a wonderful roommate and really high ceilings and bright turquoise dining room chairs that we painted all by ourselves (I painted one, Allison painted three). We have hardwood floors and one of those ladder bookcases and a little herb garden on our roof (Allison is growing herbs; I am growing mint for mojitos).

(artsy Instagram collage courtesy of Allison)

We thrifted a butcher’s block that seems to inspire somewhat passive-aggressive bouts of jealousy in anyone who sees it (We do not take offense. We encourage and nurture these feelings. We gloat.). Our shower curtain features a map of California — which is where we both grew up — and has taught us that our home state includes such humorously named cities as Chubbuck, Fort Dick, and my personal favorite, Likely.

(Chowchilla isn’t bad, either)

We still need more art to decorate the walls, but we do have a random terracotta bowl decorated with a neon-colored village scene that we plan to hang somewhere (the cashier at the thrift store stared in appreciation for a moment before deeming it “art” and giving us the 50% discount they were having on art pieces that day). We are the proud parents of a family of succulents purchased at Home Depot during that random Chicago heat spell in March.

Allison frequently bakes me delicious things that involve a lot of chocolate and/or M&Ms as well as coconut-something, and in return I provide her with… always buying us the newest issue of Real Simple?

(Awesome art poster courtesy of my father/our garage)

Despite playing host to a rampant squirrel population that only seems to increase in size by the day, our neighborhood is very charming and its houses all come outfitted with huge, midwestern porches and cute little gardens that run from the front steps to the back yard. Kids ride around on their bikes; hipsters and elders alike spend evenings sitting in lawn chairs drinking lemonade, or alcohol, or maybe both (who am I to judge?).

The farmers’ markets are going to be starting up soon, and Allison and I will be buying bikes so that we can ride to said markets, and maybe also the French bakery a few blocks away on nights when we’re feeling particularly ambitious. Bike baskets will be involved. I realize this might us push us over to the next level of “adorable,” and I’m willing to take that risk.

(Please note my plaster Greek column in the corner.)

God knows I will be the first person to brag about the perks of traveling, the gorgeous view out my hostel window, or the fact that I have gotten to see the Woman of Willendorf in Vienna, in person, twice. God also knows that I spend hours of my day staring at maps (partly due to my job) and reading through blog post upon blog post about all of the amazing places that everyone else is off exploring right now. I love traveling. I love reading about it. I will always feel jealous when someone else gets to be off exploring a new place that I haven’t seen yet.

But you know what, other travel bloggers? My home situation is pretty great right now, too. And I think you should all be as jealous of me as I am of you. I bet your hostel doesn’t have a giant orange velvet couch or a miniature herb garden on the roof (if it does, please don’t tell me. At least give me the couch on this one, guys).  Sure, you may be living it up in the apartment you’re reviewing for Roomorama, right in the city center of my favorite European town; or maybe you’re hanging out with everyone at the latest travel blogger conference (really jealous of all of your Instagram photos, by the way); or maybe you’re like my editor Brendan at Vagabundo Magazine and you decide to flee to Rome on a whim one afternoon. But you know what?

I am about to take a bath surrounded by my own candles in my own freshly-scrubbed bathtub while studiously analyzing my California shower curtain and sipping the chai tea I just made in my own kitchen, in my own mug, listening to my own music as loudly as I want (despite fearing judgment from my downstairs neighbors), or maybe watching something from my Gwyneth Paltrow queue on Netflix, which probably doesn’t work in whichever country you’re in. And I could not be happier or less jealous.

Vintage Travel Photo [Murder?] Mystery

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During my time as one of the Communications Strategies interns at the hostel in downtown Chicago, I’ve gotten to partake in something I’ve wanted to experience ever since my love affair with The X-Files began: solving a mystery with evidence that I’ve analyzed for hours in a tiny room using an old-fashioned slide projector.

Helen Pomerance was a member of the committee that worked to promote hostelling in the United States in its early stages, during the 1950s-70s. She led young travelers on several excursions by both bike and van across all parts of Europe, Hawaii, Israel, Japan, and elsewhere. This would make for an impressive story without any pictures — but, luckily for us, Helen took pictures. Hundreds of them. And they were all sitting in boxes, as slides, in the stockroom that has served as my office at the hostel.

I’d noticed the boxes of slides a few days before my supervisor approached me about going through them. It’s hard to look at a stack of boxes labeled “1950,” “1953,” “1971,” “1967,” every afternoon and not wonder about what someone could have been trying to archive.

Flipping through these slides, hundreds of slides, one by one, on a makeshift poster-board screen that we had Macgyvered together with a stack of books on either side, was as satisfying as I had imagined it would be. It took several days, and at certain points my eyes would start to hurt, but I took that to mean that I was executing this project with the right amount of fervor and determination. I like to think that Mulder and Scully would have been impressed, [albeit potentially bored by the lack of murder and aliens].

The mystery aspect came into play as we were trying to figure out where exactly many of these pictures were taken, what was happening in certain scenarios, and who a lot of the people were. Helen annotated a few of them, and I found a brief outline that either she or someone else had typed up; the outline briefly listed the countries she visited during certain years, but this still left us with the task of fitting the pictures into these countries and years based only on the subject matter in each picture.

Sometimes this was fun — I would recognize a French word in one picture and add that slide to the France pile. Or I would see a Swiss flag in the background, or I would recognize a building in Spain that I had visited only a month earlier. But some of them were really frustrating — these pictures were gorgeous and some of the candid pictures were so funny, but I had absolutely no idea where or why they were taken, or in what context, or if anyone else had ever looked through them and appreciated them as much as I had.

I’m still working with the pictures, trying to sort through them on the hostel’s Flickr account and choosing a few for the Facebook page, and I love some of them too much not to share here:

Right?

travel inspirations (think Thelma and Louise…but with less murder)

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Generally I’m not much of a TAG YOU’RE IT person — the whole concept of “tag” stressed me out a lot as a kid. It took a lot of things I couldn’t really do and forced me to perform them all at one time — running, hitting people, strategizing, interacting with my peers on a basic social level. I didn’t even like having to run after people to tag them out during my brief stint as a second baseman in 4th grade (it only took my coach a few games to figure that out, and then I was sentenced to right field).

However, Caroline of Caroline in the City has tagged me in a post she wrote about her travel inspirations, meaning she wants to hear what I have to say on the subject. Since I can participate in this form of tag while simultaneously drinking wine on my couch and not having to run around in anyone’s backyard, I’m game.

Really, though, the only image that came to mind when I thought about what inspires me to travel was this:

Being badass. If I could be as badass doing anything as Thelma and Louise were during their awesome road trip (you call it fleeing a crime scene, I call it an awesome road trip), all of my dreams would be fulfilled.

The way I described my childhood a few sentences ago might have alerted you to something — I have never really been badass in any context. I had my nose pierced for about 2 years, which was a nice attempt, and I do have a tattoo (although the word “laugh” written in my own handwriting across my lower abdomen doesn’t really conjure up any images of  danger or mystery). And one time I sort of got mugged?

I’m not really any more badass when I’m traveling than I am in real life*, but when I’m traveling it’s much easier to trick myself into believing that I am badass. When I am traveling alone and I manage to get myself to a new country, find the bus to my hostel, get myself a decent meal, locate everything I want to see in that country and then actually get myself there, take a few pictures, and make it home in one piece, I think to myself, “Ok, you’re impressive.” Things like feeding yourself and making sure you get to your bed at the end of the night are basic concepts that most of us have mastered long before we’re even living on our own, but sometimes, let’s be honest, they just take so much effort. When you can not only perform these tasks by yourself, but perform them well (i.e. using the hostel kitchen to cook yourself an actual meal rather than one of the packs of Ramen you brought from home, which is just cheating), and perform them well in a country where you can’t understand what anyone is saying to you, and when you’ve just spent the entire day getting lost in a new place and you’re so tired you can barely stand, let alone operate a European stove — when you can do that, I think you deserve to be called a badass.

On top of that, weird things happen when you’re traveling. Weird things happen in real life*, too, but they don’t have the glamour of traveling or the unfamiliar setting to back them up. When they happen in real life, these things are just funny stories to tell over dinner or manipulate into a really good Facebook status. When weird things happen during your travels, they are suddenly adventure stories. When you play them back in your head for years and years to come, you’ve assigned starring roles: you as the protagonist, possibly a cute foreign guy as the love interest, possibly a gold-toothed French man as the bad guy (the characters can vary depending on the genre of your particular adventure. Liam Neeson usually stars in all of mine.). There’s usually a soundtrack you’ve chosen. You’ve carefully selected each adjective and analyzed the plot structure.

One time I got robbed in France (money stolen from my makeup bag so no real struggle or badass triumph was involved, just a lot of frantic sobbing and way less souvenirs). I’ve been to a massive rave on a French beach, I stayed on a boat along the coast of Gibraltar, I took a few writing lessons from a BBC journalist in Scotland, I went to the self-proclaimed “Big Lebowski Bar” in Dresden, I participated in a home swap with a French family from Normandy (they got Boyf’s house, we got their massive chateau in the middle of the gorgeous French countryside, complete with a horse ranch, silo for brewing cider, and an impressive fossil display in the living room), I accidentally took pictures of Sandra Cho in Saint Tropez when Grey’s Anatomy was still respected, and I got to see the Woman of Willendorf in person not once, but TWICE IN MY LIFETIME (possibly the only legitimately badass thing on this list).

None of that is particularly impressive in the grand scheme of things — I have never gone sky-diving, I have never been in a ship wreck, I have never gotten seriously injured and made a triumphant recovery in a foreign hospital, I’ve never done anything particularly influential along the lines of aiding humanity in any way, and I know that. I’m working up to it. Still, each of those little stories makes me feel good about myself. I am tickled to the point of using the word “tickled” when I announce I’m about to go off traveling alone for a certain period of time and the first thing someone asks me is, “Aren’t you scared?”  This makes me believe that I am doing something monumentally impressive and dangerous, when really it’s just slightly impressive when compared to most other things I do and dangerous in the sense that I am always on the brink of getting irreversibly lost.

I know that none of us really had much faith in my potential for badassery when we saw what I did with my softball career all those years ago. The most I had going for me at that point (aside from my ability to look adorable in right field) was the fact that the other teams’ pitchers always accidentally hit me with the ball, which always allowed me to take a base, which made me a very valuable lead hitter. I sort of wish I could go back to right field, hand my nine-year-old self some ice for whatever part of her body the pitch had hit that time, and tell her that she probably won’t ever accomplish the level of badassery she dreams about during the really slow innings, but that she will get to travel to dozens of really cool places all by herself when she grows up — and that’ll at least get her closer.

 

*I did not mean to refer to those in-between phases of my travels that I spend at home as “real life” in this post…twice. Will need to psychoanalyze this in a future post, probably.