Maltese Memories

Tags

football, friends, island, Malta, Mediterranean, soccer, World Cup

My memories of Malta, formed mere weeks ago, are jumbled and not altogether sensible. Like many recollections of past trips, the ones formed here make no sense on paper, but the associations are somehow even more solid for their inexplicability to others. I’ve written before about some nonsensical links I’ll always have from my travels and how they sound absurd to outsiders but are so tightly connected for me. Think Boy George and St. Petersburg, Russia. R.E.M. and the roads of the Peloponnese. Beyond those questionable musical connections, I’ve reminisced about toilets in France, paper products in Tibet, a mysterious white horse in Ecuador, my radio claim to fame in Cape Town, and so many other random but powerful memories.

As our trip to Malta was planned, we only really had four days to explore and get to know our travel mates better. As executed, we were down to three days and two nights, and a chunk of that turned out to be devoted to a couple of World Cup football matches, a sporting event I don’t think I had ever watched – or really wanted to watch – in my life.

The trip started poorly, with our Turkish Airlines flight leaving Houston so late that we missed our connection and had to spend what would have been our first evening of cocktails and dinner with old and new friends at Istanbul airport instead. It could have been worse. IST has been massively updated, and the place was hopping with activity, had a decent airside hotel, and offered an array of fun dinner options. Not Plan A, but we made the best of it.

Arriving early on day two, we met Kelly and J, along with J’s brother and his wife (an amazing bonus couple!), at our quaint little hotel in Valletta. After a quick breakfast, we were off for a walking tour of the capital city, some barely-past-noon beers, and then a boat ride to the Three Cities, which the group had explored a little bit the day before we arrived. Here we were treated not only to toasty yellow stone walls and narrow streets, but to the brotherly banter of J and T. My J is one of two brothers as well, and it was clear even in the first hours of strolling and chatting that we would be a compatible, and often goofy, group!

Kelly and J had spent the previous week in Doha at the World Cup, and like true World Cup fans, their schedule in Malta would include a double header of matches on our second night. Not certain we would be able to sit through both contests, we showed up for match #1, Croatia vs. Brazil, with intentions of politely watching for a short time and having a small amount to eat and drink with the group before venturing out on our own for the evening. In short order, however, we tumbled headlong into the excitement of the match and a cascade of drinks and cheers. Buoyed by the upset results, we hung around for a change in venue and the start of the next quarterfinal, Netherlands vs. Argentina, only to find ourselves once again entranced by a sport we had only ever suffered through as our children played youth soccer for the few years we all could tolerate.

We did manage to see more of Malta than the two bars that hosted our soccer-viewing marathon. In addition to the Three Cities, we ventured out on a bus to Marsaxlokk, a small fishing village south of the capital.

We ambled for hours above, below, and within the burnished stone walls of this fortified little island, and we even had a Michelin-star dinner at Noni in Valletta.

We admired doors and door knockers,

San Francisco-style urban hills,

and a full complement of beguiling streetscapes.

We burned a path in Merchants Street, up to the city gates and Christmas market, back down to the hotel, up to St. John’s cathedral and its Caravaggio paintings, down to Fort St. Elmo, over to Old Bakery Street, and out onto the ramparts on all sides of the city.

We got a solid feel for this unique little island that sits between Sicily and Tunisia, and we had a great time with our friends old and new. It was a joy to be back in Europe again and, in spite of its newness to us, it had the familiar old feel of so many beloved places on the Mediterranean.

We’ll remember the walks and the walls, the cuisine and the scenery, but when we think about Malta in the future, my bet is that we’ll always associate it with soccer (ok – football; see how fast I’m learning?!) and the simple good times of watching those exciting matches with beers and snacks in hand and convivial friends by our side. We even watched the finals when we got home; we’re hooked, and it’s all because we met Kelly and J and T and R in Malta!

Taking a Leap

Tags

Canada, Decision-making, leap of faith, Malta, roadtrips, Vancouver, western U.S.

It’s fitting that my blogging and real-life friend Kelly introduced me to the expression “Leap, and the net will appear.” Not much leaping has gone on here for a while, but it was an innocuous message from Kelly a few days ago that launched a swift and thrilling decision to meet her and husband J in Malta just four short weeks from today. That has, in turn, prompted my first blog post in quite a while. Not exactly a high-wire act, but a pretty nice shot of adrenaline after these last few years!

Lake Tahoe: the last place we saw Kelly and J

I go through phases of throw-caution-to-the-wind leaping. There are times like the one where I decided on a whim to cash in my airline miles and fly for 48 hours in order to meet other blogging friends Lisa and Fabio on their sailboat off the coast of Madagascar for a week, and other stretches when I settle into a safer existence in which any sort of impulsive decision-making seems irresponsible or just too damn hard to pull off.

Madagascar: Lisa, Lexie, lemurs!

Jumping back onto the blog feels scary and impetuous, too. I’ve drafted plenty of posts that fizzled out mid-composition in recent months; they just felt boring and uninspired, perhaps because my blog is about travel stories, ideally set in exotic or far-flung locales, and all I had done in the last several years was drive our car back and forth across the U.S. and western Canada.

You’ve read all about my road trip addiction, the pull to the west as summer gets underway, the call of blue byways when the days are long and a sense of giddy adventure rises in my chest as we exit a new hotel on a warm morning. But even the granddaddy of our road trips to date (over 5000 miles, starting in Houston and making our turnaround in Whistler, British Columbia, and in between big chunks of Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, and Utah) failed to inspire a riveting, or even good, tale. A little follow-up drive of some 3000 miles up the spine of the Appalachians was equally beautiful … and equally devoid of mass interest. You’ve been there, done all this driving with me before!

Sure, it was fun and very scenic at times, and the people part has been great. Lots of family, some more bloggers like Alison and Don in Vancouver, our now-IRL pals Pam and Sean in Oregon, my 29029 gang at Whistler Mountain, and my best high school and college friends in Montana and South Carolina.

Vancouver and Whistler probably did deserve a write-up; they were first-time destinations for me and were breathtakingly gorgeous, but I just couldn’t flesh out a compelling story.

Bend, Oregon was a photographer’s dream, the southeast and Appalachians offered somewhat fresher driving routes, and there was even a new grandbaby visit in there for good (the best) measure! Still, a narrative eluded me, photo essays aren’t really my stock-in-trade, and personal stories have been mostly off-limits here.

In our non-travel life, we’ve been contemplating other big leaps as well. Our reason for establishing a second base in Colorado two years ago (our son’s growing family) suddenly disappeared when he took a new job in Ohio in July. That tipped the east-west scale a little farther to the right, with kids now in San Francisco, Ohio, and Boston, and precipitated a now-endless discussion of whether we should stay put in the middle of the country to be able to fly quickly to any of the three places (really four, since my parents are still in Pennsylvania) or try to move somewhere where three of the four could be reached by car in a day’s driving? With my husband J’s job allowing him to work from anywhere these days, we began to contemplate a relocation, but we know better than to follow peripatetic children, and part of our mostly-practical selves keeps saying to be patient.

I think we can sit on that decision a while longer, but the overseas travel itch was not as easy to push off. Perhaps a sudden or last-minute opportunity is more conducive to decision-making, at least in our household. We can’t seem to make dinner plans with friends or neighbors for months on end, but when one of us suddenly proposes an outing that evening, it works! In this case, Kelly casually suggested we join them, I latched onto the idea, J was impressively open to it, and two days later, everything was booked … I hope she really meant it! Next post from Malta!

On Repeat

Tags

Costa Rica, family, family travel, Jaco, Manuel Antonio National Park, repeat travel

I’ve written before about my penchant for repeat travel. I don’t really understand people who check places off a list, who believe that going anywhere more than once is a waste of time, money, or a chance to bolster a count of some kind. Some travelers – I am clearly one! – happily return to places they have enjoyed (and even places they have not), perhaps to deepen an understanding or maybe to change their minds about a subpar initial experience. (Believe me, there is no value judgment intended here; I want to keep seeing new places as much as anyone else.)

Much of the last two-plus years has been a more painful exercise in repetition, not just in the travel realm, and when I looked back at where I had gone since my last post in July of 2021, I couldn’t help but see many of the same places over and over again. There were good reasons for that – family most of all – but the main one was that we hadn’t been able to really spread our wings in all that time.

Home

Now, I’ve recently returned from my first journey out of the country since February of 2020 and it was, you guessed it, a repeat: my third trip to Costa Rica. It was the least ambitious of my forays there but still a great way to triangulate what I know about this small Central American country. Like many, we have cancelled our fair share of travel plans in the last few years, so when my son and his wife asked if I wanted to join them on a trip in late April, I jumped at the chance. They had their own travel goal: getting one final country stamp in their daughter’s passport before she turned two and had to start paying for a ticket!

Our family’s initial trip to Costa Rica was twenty years ago, a spring break trip with our three kids to the west coast of the country and our first experience with eco-tourism. The hotel had no A/C or TV, was strategically built into a jungly hillside to catch ocean breezes and optimally manage water and waste, and served food from sustainable and organic sources.

At our kids’ ages at the time, it helped that it was also a veritable wildlife refuge, with howler monkeys in the trees outside our room and giant iguanas that roamed the pool deck. A short jaunt down the road was Manuel Antonio National Park, a tiny gem that we spent several days exploring with knowledgeable nature guides.

We returned in 2005 to spend nine days of our Christmas break volunteering in a small village in the Monteverde Cloud Forest. This was not the same cushy vacation we’d had a few years earlier! We stayed in a rustic motel that cost $10/night, where my daughter and I found a spider the size of my fist in the ice-cold shower on day one. We dug trenches for pipes, mixed concrete by hand, moved endless piles of cement blocks, painted, hammered, and cleaned.

Overseas volunteer trips were in their infancy at the time, and we have always been happy we took such a trip before many of these ventures became little more than vanity projects. We felt truly connected with the villagers who worked alongside us for a week and a half, and we were required to take our work cues from them, whether or not we might do it that way at home. It was a valuable lesson in servant leadership. As simplistic and hyperbolic as it may sound, I still believe this trip was the initial driver for our children’s later careers and other life choices.

Last month’s excursion had no such lofty ambitions, unless bonding with my granddaughter and her parents counts (I think it does, actually!). This time, as we did on the first visit, we spent a day near San Jose to recharge after the long trip with a toddler. We were especially happy with that plan after our flight was delayed, our car rental became a series of mishaps, and we reached our hotel after midnight.

The rest of our days – again, on the west coast, this time in Jacó – were pure vacation as we walked the beach, played in the pool, and ambled into and around the small town for groceries, dining, and of course, ice cream. In a full-circle kind of outing on our last day, we took little E to revisit the eco-resort as well as Manuel Antonio National Park, and both were just as delightful as they were when her daddy was 14 years old!

It felt great to break the seal on staying put in the U.S. Now I’m itching for more, so I’ll need to twist J’s arm to get back out there in the near future. Until then, I’m savoring one more repeat stamp, even if I’ve got a couple of new ones in mind for this year!

On the Road Again

Tags

29029Everesting, Bald Mountain, California, hiking, Montana, Oregon, roadtrip, traveling with dogs, western U.S., Wyoming

It was finally time for a more comprehensive tour of the western U.S., especially now that Covid was on the wane and we had a mini-HQ in Colorado from which to depart. We’d seen a decent assortment of places out west over the years; in fact, no state we would see was a stranger to us, but we had never committed consecutive weeks of time to just rambling around the region.

The Itinerary: Our schedule and destinations were predicated on seeing friends and family in a number of cities, and I had the added incentive of spending some active, prolonged time at higher altitudes to prepare for a mountain event I planned to do in Idaho in the middle of the trip. I drove from Houston to the Denver area in late May, spent a week in our little Colorado abode, and trained in the foothills on my own and with a fellow event participant. I loaded up the pup in early June and headed over the Rockies to Salt Lake City and on to Boise, Idaho, where I stopped long enough to pick up my husband at the airport and walk Boise’s mellow, refreshing Greenbelt for an hour or two before setting off once again to make Bend, Oregon by nightfall.

After three days in Bend, we meandered through southern Oregon to Crater Lake National Park and on to Northern California and the Mount Shasta area. San Francisco was next, a city stay that still featured plenty of hiking in Muir Woods and Angel Island, and after the weekend, we pointed the car east to Lake Tahoe. A stunning drive north into Idaho landed us in the Sun Valley/Ketchum area, where we split up – husband and dog to a nice hotel for work and some play, and me to my Bald Mountain hiking challenge and decidedly less cushy lodging (a tent). Four days later, we followed the Salmon River on a jaw-dropping drive through the Sawtooth Mountains to Bozeman, Montana, and a few days after that, we were traversing the Beartooth Highway, northeast and northern Yellowstone National Park, and then western Yellowstone and the Big Sky area. The incredible Tetons were our final stop before returning to Colorado after three glorious weeks.

Friends and Family: A big part of our motivation to stop in the places we did was to see our kids and some old (and new) friends. As a bonus to start my trip, I overlapped for a few days with our daughter and her husband who were visiting Colorado, and I also got to spend some joyous days and evenings watching our one and only granddaughter try to take her first toddling steps with our older son and his wife. In Bend, we reunited with friends with whom we had done volunteer work in Costa Rica and Mexico, and in two minutes, the twelve years since our last get-together disappeared in a rush of old memories and fondness.

A weekend in San Francisco was our first chance to see our younger son’s new life since a job change during Covid took him cross-country with his girlfriend. In the Lake Tahoe area, my fourth-ever blogger meet-up was a big success; Kelly (Compass and Camera) and I had always joked that we must be sisters from other mothers, and I think our dinner together supported that notion! “The Js,” our two husbands, got along great also – always a plus.

My J got together with an old work colleague and friend in Sun Valley, and I must note that in the first two days without me, he managed to fall and skin his arms and legs on both a trail run and a mountain bike ride (and people think I was the crazy one doing the mountain challenge …). In Montana, we had a too-short visit with my dear, best friend from high school, and we arrived back in Colorado just a few days after grandbaby E became a bonafide walker (hiking with Gigi cannot be far behind!). What a fantastic way to add love, friendship, and context to all the new places we went!

Travels with Tashi: We got a new puppy last spring, and I am still not used to the complications he adds to our lives after more than a year, even after being a former dog owner for fifteen years. The two-and-a-half-year gap between dogs must have spoiled me because now I can almost not tolerate having to think about his schedule and all the gear we have to haul around for him, especially in a city hotel where the car is nowhere near the room.

Still, he was a trooper. Like our other pup, Tashi is great in a moving car, on some days chilling in his crate on and off for up to nine hours while we stopped in small towns and pulled off the road for one of my 7 million photos. We introduced him to various cabins, hotel rooms, and strangers’ houses over the weeks on the road, and he was impressively nonplussed. After a few attempts to hike with this energetic little guy, we gave up and left him in our accommodations while we did the longer trails because he is still in the eat-everything stage, and one night of severe illness was enough to dissuade us from trying that again on this trip.

Yes, he is small, but the chair is enormous!

Hikes Galore: Our goal is always to find a hike or two anywhere we go, and this trip produced the goods. In Bend, our friends pointed us to Smith Rock State Park, which exceeded all expectations by a mile (or five). The climbs were a great warm-up for me, afforded stunning views, and wound us through all sorts of rock formations (see “Monkey Face” below) before a steep descent.

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Crater Lake offered a series of snowy walks, which we had to let Tashi enjoy with us. Being from Houston, he found the cold, wet stuff to be a captivating novelty, and we were happy to give up some longer walks to see him scampering around the rim of this enormous, deep-blue lake. (Hard to ferret out cigarette butts in the snow anyway.)

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Our SF son knows we are not content to just sit around and eat at fun restaurants (which we did both nights), so he took us to Muir Woods to reprise the Dipsea Trail hike we did a few summers ago, and he tacked on a nice, steep descent and climb back up out of a woodsy ravine to end our morning. The next day, he and his girlfriend booked us all a ferry ride to Angel Island, where we biked and hiked the entire island on a crisp, sunny Sunday.

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Kelly pointed us to many, many hikes and other sights in the Lake Tahoe area, and we ditched Tashi again to marvel at the scenic east coast of the lake on the Tunnel Creek-Sand Harbor walkway, hike down into the Emerald Bay area, poke around Sugar Pine Point State Park, and take an easy amble through more historic lodges at Tallac Historic Site at the end of one day.

In Sun Valley, I hiked Bald Mountain more times than I ever need to again (fifteen, to be exact), and J got in some solid elevation on Proctor Mountain and then Bald Mountain himself when my event was over. Like a normal person, he summited once, but he did have to get down on his own, which is a knee-buster of a descent.

Bozeman was my cool-down, but we had to get a few little hikes in, trekking up Drinking Horse Mountain trail for a grand view of the Bridger range in the morning and capping the day with a sunset stroll up Peet’s Hill, a local mound that was surprisingly satisfying and enjoyable … and we even let Tashi do this one with us, lucky little guy.

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In the big national parks – Yellowstone and Grand Teton – we mostly took abbreviated strolls with the dog, snapping photos at turn-outs and walking short distances from there. We did sneak away for an easy four-miler at Taggart Lake one morning at GTNP, and it was a beauty.

Lakes Galore: I knew we had Crater Lake and its deep cobalt waters on the agenda, but I hadn’t stopped to think about all the magnificent lakes we’d ogle on this trip. Lake Tahoe – Big Blue itself – was a worthy rival for the Oregon national park site, and many smaller lakes on the trip caught our eye as well. From serene and still to deep and powerful, the lakes all reflected and magnified the splendor around them and quickly became a highlight of the trip.

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Big Skies and Wide-Open Spaces: The West is dominated by its skies, and we couldn’t get enough of the clouds – from pale, wispy strands to pregnant white poofs to looming gray masses  – adrift on the overhead sea. Entire days passed with us seemingly inside an Old Master or impressionistic painting – the vast fields lime and lemon hued, the pines adding a punch of dark green, the peaks a bit of stony punctuation, and the waters a mirror of that gigantic canopy of sky. The expansiveness got under our skin, and we both commented on how hard it would be to go back to city life and its confined spaces.

Geothermal features: Hot springs and geysers have never attracted me much, but the spectrum of colors and ethereal mists at Yellowstone were a worthy addition to my “geo-art” series of photos over the years. I might have snapped more pictures here than anywhere else on the trip, and that’s saying a lot with Crater Lake and Lake Tahoe’s over-the-top photogenic appeal.

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The “road” in roadtrips: I love a good non-interstate, and we naturally hit a lot of “blue highways” on this trip and went out of our way to drive others. Highway 75 from Sun Valley to Redfish Lake, Idaho, a twisting ascent up through the Sawtooths and over Galena Pass, was one such treat (secondarily because we had absolutely no cell service for hours, so there was no temptation to be distracted), and it was followed by an equally-isolated drive that followed the Salmon River for many miles and hours. We drove two hours out of our way from Bozeman, Montana, one morning in order to start our Yellowstone trip from its northeast entrance. After that eastern swing landed us in Red Lodge, we hooked back west to drive the entire length of the Beartooth Highway (US Route 12) from there to Cooke City/Silver Gate and into the national park.

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In Summary: The trip brought home our desire to live at least part of the year amid mountains, streams, woods, and open skies. We have taken a baby step in that direction with a small apartment in Colorado, and only time will tell if that is enough … or too much? … with our kids spread from coast to coast, and ongoing jobs and life changes for family members in all four of our time zones. Meanwhile, we have the memories of this brilliant road trip, which I would have been happy to continue for at least a few more weeks. Responsibilities lured us back to our humid home, but we’ve already agreed a western journey will be a permanent fixture on our summer docket.

Road Trip to the Border

Tags

Acuña, Del Rio, girls' trip, Mexico, on the border, road trip, Texas

There are no guns or robberies in this story, no convertibles, and, I’m sorry to say, no trysts with a young Brad Pitt. We are no Thelma and Louise; we’re just L and L on our own girls’ road trip with plenty of laughs, a whole lot of talking, maybe a little bit of wine, more than a few foodstuffs that rarely pass our lips on a regular basis, and even a few “daring” border crossings.

In pre-pandemic January, my friend L flew from Chicago to Houston to take a four-day road trip with me into the middle of Texas. As a little background, L is one of those people who is interested in everything (that is a good thing), and the mere mention of a place or activity, no matter where it was heard or read, can send her off on a quest. (I still thank our lucky stars for her voracious guidebook reading, or we would have never screeched to a halt a few decades ago to herd our six kids into the best sheep farm ever in New Zealand!)

With that in mind, you must know that this trip largely came about because of an article L saw on a plane in American Way magazine, in which the tiny city of Del Rio, Texas, was featured. She was convinced by the flattering multi-page spread that Del Rio had to be the best kept travel secret ever, “a peach of a town” she kept calling it, and she wanted to make it the centerpiece of our trip.

I did some research of my own and quickly determined that the small town on the Mexican border sounded like a good place to drop in. For a day. Max. It did have some appealing draws – new art galleries and craft beer bars in the small downtown, a curious mix of vegetation and wildlife based on its location, and nearby, incredible prehistoric cave drawings and an International Dark Sky Sanctuary. A nice bonus would be a walk over the bridge linking Del Rio and Ciudad Acuña, Mexico, if we got our way. (Lots of people tried to dissuade us from getting our way. Before we left, we got the usual friends-and-family lectures on U.S./Mexico border towns, and even the front desk employees at our hotel looked at us in dismay when we asked how we could make the crossing. But I’m getting ahead of myself.)

We left Houston on a weekday morning, hoping to get to San Antonio for lunch and Del Rio for dinner. We planned to spend the evening and the next day in that peach of a town, and then move on to Fredericksburg, Enchanted Rock, Dripping Springs, Luckenback, and every farm-to-market road we could find on the way back home. While many of those places deserve to be, and have previously been, chronicled here, the rest of today’s story is all about Del Rio and its Mexican sister city, Acuña.

Our first glimpse of the magazine-lauded qualities of Del Rio turned out to be the bright yellow Julio’s tortilla chip factory and restaurant, right on our route into town. We resisted a stop, but we did succumb to a supermarket purchase of a jumbo-sized bag of the famous chips to power our ride the next day. (As a side note, there were also Buc-ee’s sea salt caramels, home-made chocolate chip cookies from another hotel, and a few more wonderfully unhealthy treats consumed along the way.)

We “explored” downtown Del Rio that evening; almost everything was closed, but we did find a great little craft brewpub with good beer, some comfort food, and most important, a couple of young girls who worked there who assured us that a walk into Acuña the next day would be safe and fun.

Wednesday dawned wet and dreary, with a heavy mass of swollen clouds nearly touching the ground, so we had to ditch our bird sanctuary hiking plans and replace them with a nature museum and a drive across the Lake Amistad dam – half in the U.S. and half in Mexico – in case we got rained out (or chickened out) of the walk across the border later.

Having accidentally driven into Mexico from El Paso a number of years ago, and then getting stuck there for hours trying to get back into the U.S. with a rental car and a minor daughter with no ID, I was a little more skittish than necessary about driving past the sign that warned “LAST CHANCE TO TURN AROUND BEFORE ENTERING MEXICO.”

So we made mistake #1. We parked outside that gate and walked in. It appeared that only vehicles could go to the right, so we went left … apparently into an official area where entry was forbidden. We walked for about two minutes before we were approached by the border police and pointed right back out to our car.

Still confused but slightly emboldened by the instructions he gave us, we got in the car, crossed our fingers, and went through the official lane to cross the bridge. A quarter of the way across the bridge/dam, we saw a parking area on the side and got out to see what we could see. Almost before we saw anything, shots rang out, a peppery rat-a-tat-tat that sent us jumping back into the car and hightailing it down the ramp into the U.S entry checkpoint, our minds full of violent scenarios.

The immigration officer was semi-amused. “Those were shots to ward off the turkey buzzards,” she smiled, barely. “Did you at least get to the commemorative plaque in the middle?”

“Umm, no,” we replied sheepishly. “If we actually enter Mexico, will we be able to get back in here easily?”

“It’s hardly a border; you’ll be in the middle of the bridge. You can park and then turn around. I’ll be here,” she added. I could sense her trying hard not to roll her eyes.

Since there were no other travelers and no lines, we finally went to stand with one foot in each country, straddling the Rio Grande, sort of, and contemplating the forbidding terrain on either side of the river. Re-entry was quick and easy, as promised, and we were on our way back to Del Rio.

We couldn’t really say that was going to Mexico, could we? Googlemaps and some other online sleuthing led us next to a bleak parking lot on the U.S. side of the Del Río-Ciudad Acuña International Bridge. We waded through giant mud puddles, slogged for a mile down the berm of a 4-lane highway, crossed the bridge, and finally reached an impressively large and modern Port of Entry complex. We went through customs with about two other visitors on foot, wound through a series of corridors, and landed in Acuña just before noon.

The welcome sign suggested it was party time, but unfortunately, the town was a bit less colorful, with only a few little bodegas and kitschy shops open for business. (To be fair, the weather was truly dismal.) We strolled up and down the main drag, Miguel Hidalgo, and finally lucked into the one spot we’d read about for lunch: La Fama, a more modern bar/restaurant with a homey atmosphere and good food and beer.

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In the past, Acuña apparently had quite a late-night scene; a string of clubs and bars drew crowds of students and others, and during the day, citizens of both towns crossed the border for work and school. Even though much of the after-dark revelry ramped down with the rise of warring cartels, the cities avoided much of the drug-fueled violence of other border towns, and today, as in many places along the Rio Grande, Ciudad Acuña and Del Rio still have a symbiotic and easy relationship.

Hundreds of workers continue to go over the border and back each day for work, children are driven to private schools on the other side, and the economy is inseparably integrated. The mayors of the two towns are friendly, cooperating daily on big things, like international trade and infrastructure projects, as well as smaller details like easy border crossings for their residents. It all works just fine, as far as we could discern. No big walls, no big deal, just the way it should be.

By mid-afternoon, we had crossed back into the U.S. for the third time (the immigration officer asked us why we had two stamps in the last four hours!) and were on our way north into the better-known Hill Country. Although the next three days had many highlights of their own, I had to admit the unlikely destination L had discovered in her in-flight reading ended up being the part of the road trip that stuck with us longest. There’s a whole other world out there, and a lot of it is just a short road trip away from home!

A Better Kind of Isolation

Tags

Cadillac Ranch, Colorado, isolation, New Mexico, open road, road trip, Texas, Texas Panhandle

For the second time in little over a year, I point my car northwest on a 1000-mile journey, and then retrace it, through some of the bleakest land in the country. There and back in 32 hours last year, and there and back again a few weeks ago, this time sweetened in the middle by a most joyous event: the birth of our first grandchild. That the trip follows on the heels of a solid two months sequestered at home makes it all the more liberating, and I savor the trip almost as much as the heart-bursting reason behind it.

Like the previous trip, I do this one alone and almost in silence – no podcasts for me, or playlists, or even the radio most of the way (there really is no radio reception most of the way!). These are the times my thoughts get to meander as far as the land does, without limits or defined edges.

My mind yawns open like the arroyos out the window; the past and future wander into my head while the present plays out amid the rocking horse oil pumps, the wind turbines, the fields of grain and cattle, the ridges and folds and dusty flats that are palpable beneath my wheels. I point my phone camera out the bug-splattered windows over and over again, trying to capture a strange bliss I could never properly explain.

I savor mile after mile, hour upon hour, of the Texas Panhandle – beige and chalky, then red and earthy, reeking of cows, and beaten by wind. For long stretches I hear what sounds like a thin metal whip flaying the roof of my vehicle. It abates as I slow from 80 mph to pass through tiny, rural towns – a few battered houses, a feed store, a gas station from the ‘50s, a BBQ joint, a Chinese or Mexican restaurant from time to time.

In a few spots, I might catch a glimpse of a strip joint like the (surely beachy) Player’s Bikini Club, or perhaps a big-ass gun shop, or an ad for a steak the size of New York, none of which feature in my daily life and are therefore endlessly amusing to me.

In a matter of seconds, I’m through these towns and back on the open road. Many people would find the sere landscape dull or depressing, but I find its scoured featurelessness profoundly pleasurable. It’s a blank backdrop for old camp songs, writing ideas, life-plan reviews, a phone call here and there. I barely need to turn the wheel, and the hours effortlessly slip by.

I’ve started from barely above sea level, and by the time I hit Amarillo, Texas, I’m at 3000 feet, riding the high plains ever higher, to almost 4000 feet by the time I reach Dalhart, nearly 5000 by the Texas-New Mexico state line. I never feel I’ve left flat ground, though, inching through those feet of ascent ever so slowly.

Deeper into New Mexico, the gradual rise becomes steeper; by the time I get to Raton Pass and thunder down into Colorado, I am at almost 8000 feet, and both before and after the pass, my views become more three-dimensional and colorful. Late spring growth softens the land, and pine trees begin to replace the drier juniper, cottonwood and mesquite varieties. Distant peaks poke out of the corrugated foreground, some still snow-covered, adding a depth of field that I welcome in spite of my contentment with the monotony.

There are even some less natural sparks of color from time to time. My favorite is Cadillac Ranch, a field of half-buried cars outside of Amarillo, a scene I have wanted to see on the first three passes over this route. On the way home, I finally go out of my way to stop.

The installation is surreal – a garish row of spray-painted Caddies with their tail fins rising out of a sun-bleached cow pasture – and I roam the perimeter as much as I can, avoiding the painters who are encouraged to make their own marks on the “sculpture” of ten cars, originally buried nose-down here in 1974.

It is an hour before sundown on a scorching evening; the western rays are blinding, and the hot wind out in the field has me parched within minutes. Still, I walk slowly back to the car, prolonging what will be my last night in the vast emptiness.

As I drive closer to low ground, humidity, and the big city, I don’t want the trip to end. I choose an alternate way into Houston, sticking to smaller roads that bisect horse farms and white-fenced meadows. And then I am back to the 13-lane Katy Freeway, the gauntlet I must run to get home. Muscles tensed and brain overloaded for the first time in weeks, I finally snap the radio on. Already buffeted by stimuli, I figure a little more won’t hurt. I’ll stay in overdrive in my lush green surroundings for the next month, and then … I’ll make the same soothing trip all over again!

Hello from Houston

Tags

coronavirus, COVID-19, home, pandemic, quarantine, rule breakers, rule followers

The group of friends moved together on the pier, jostling and laughing, one boy hip-checking another, three girls giggling in a group hug … “Noooooo,” I find my brain screaming,”Separate! You can’t be that close to each other!”

Six feet apart, fellas, six feet!

Is my hometown another place where people are not following government restrictions on gathering? Well, yes, sort of, in a few places, but that scene described above is an example of what I’ve been yelling at people in movies and on the pages of the books I’m reading! Our new normal has become so firmly entrenched in my mind already that I am not even distinguishing real-life physical contact with fictional or virtual closeness. What will this do to our post-COVID lives and attitudes, I have to wonder?

Silly reactions and philosophizing aside, we are here in Houston being rule-followers, like many of my blogging friends from all over the world. We canceled our trip to Southeast Asia in February for fear we might get stranded there, and now we are looking at those destinations as perhaps safer places to be right now than in our own individual-liberty-obsessed land (1).

My beloved running routes along the bayous are now packed with stir-crazy people wanting to get out of the house. Most are well-behaved, sticking to their side of the paths and maintaining appropriate physical distances. Some are still way too bunched-up with groups of friends, and a few infuriating idiots are passing balls and tackling each other, climbing over the closed dog-park fence, or taking turns pressing their grubby fingers down on the water fountain spigot. As of today, I will be running in the streets; they are emptier anyway, and I am less likely to work myself up over the rule-breakers.

Here in my house, my husband is working non-stop from an upper floor, trying to keep his company and its customers solvent. We are lucky to have his continued salary and the ability to buy some extra food and leave a few generous tips when we get takeout meals. My own paltry pay (barely worthwhile in normal times) has stopped as I cannot do much work for my employer from home. Last week I was a whirlwind, cleaning and baking and organizing, and now I’m feeling like a lazy slob.

Yesterday, we escaped with an outing a few hours west to see the bluebonnets and Indian paintbrushes that sprout each spring on the roadsides of Texas. The giant freeways were empty on our way out of the city, the shopping centers and car dealerships eerily deserted. Being in the country was therapeutic and temporarily calming, but now we are back in the house, J very stressed and I at loose ends.

I’m aware that this is the worst post I’ve ever written – disjointed, incohesive, and just plain boring – but like others, I wanted to connect in some way with the wider world (2). Please stay safe and healthy and sane as we all work together to stop this virus.

ADDENDA:

(1) It bears noting that I greatly value the individual freedoms our country affords us, and I am very lucky to have been born here. But I also value science, common sense, community spirit, and public health, so sometimes those personal rights need to be subjugated for the common good, and I think there are people and places that are understanding that better than we are right now.

(2) I need you, readers! My three kids have about had it with my incessant texts and emails, jokes and cartoons! 🙂

Where Ruins Rule

Tags

Antigua, Art, earthquakes, Guatemala, memory, ruins, the past, volcanoes

When we suddenly find a flight to Antigua, Guatemala after a last-minute change of travel plans, we’ve got to act fast. In the next 24 hours, we need to find lodging, a list of top sightseeing stops, a few active outings, and a way to get around. We do an obligatory Google exploration and then hit the search bars on the websites of a few blogging friends we seem to remember have been here (thank you, Alison and Don and Nicole!), and in a few short hours, we have a preliminary plan.

We quickly see what we expected to see: the cheerful metal of the chicken buses, the alabaster church fronts, the small Mayan women wrapped in jewel-toned garments and stooped under their loads of street wares. The chock-a-block markets, the volcanoes that loom over the town and stud the countryside. The chocolate, the coffee, the jade.

And then a strange thing happens. We really have no major objectives here; in fact, we have a perfect excuse to just be – we’ve had no time to plan! – to take things in, to let the city in through our eyes and our minds for a few days. We slooowww down, and J patiently lets me stop and photograph things that do not tell a typical kind of travel story.

Writers and readers love whole, substantial things – buildings and shrines, temples and monuments. Histories, records, narratives. The more we amble aimlessly around Antigua, the more I am drawn to its pieces, and the bits that draw me the most are the walls – both the scuffed-up sides of ordinary buildings and the decaying exteriors of the enormous number of ruins in this earthquake-terrorized town.

What draws me so insistently to these panels of imperfection? At home, I like modern architecture and clean lines, sleek surfaces and a dearth of clutter, yet the chipped and faded paint on the crumbling walls pulls me in, as do the hulking structures, half hollowed out, strewn around the town, their deterioration conjuring the past even as they sit among the trappings of modern life.

They please the eye first, a patchwork of color and texture, a random splash of shapes not specifically formed by man. The elements have crafted this art; the rain has faded the reds, the volcanic dirt has darkened the yellows, the brush of body parts and clothing has burnished the blues. Then they begin to work on memory, evoking time gone by both here and everywhere – the rise and fall of civilizations, of peoples and ideas.

Which color came first? Was it the oxidized reds and ochres that appear most frequently? The yellows seem old, too, and so soft, almost as if they were done in colored pencil.

I imagine the whites being added later, maybe the blues also, as later generations cooled the colors down, an attempt to add a little crisp cleanness to the hot, dusty town perhaps.

Paul Cooper, writing in a BBC art and culture article, says “[ruins] are places an observer can get lost, where time slips away.” I feel this happening at the sanctuary of San Francisco, a complex of religious structures outside of the main streets that is without question my favorite place in town.

There is a functioning church here, a faded beauty after multiple earthquakes altered its form over the years, but it’s the gardens around the church where a trance sets in and time does slip away. There are fields of stone rising from the earth, heaving up from the grass and among the palm trees.

Bougainvillea languishes on a shattered stairwell; splintered archways admit huge ovals of sky, and more gaping holes yawn in pitted walls. New green growth sprouts from dirt-filled crevices between stone and brick; I’m transfixed by the apposition of destruction and regrowth.

At a certain point, though, I snap to, and begin to question my infatuation with the decay. Is this like disaster tourism, wanting to exalt for the sake of art and literature what was a horrific time for generations of Guatemalans? Am I imposing a developed world appreciation for those “artistic” mottled walls on the modest city shops when they are really just a result of poverty, a fix that is simply unaffordable?

Cooper comes to my rescue on the first count. “Mankind has always lived among its own ruins. Since our earliest history, we have explored ruined places, feared them and drawn inspiration from them, and we can trace that complex fascination in our art and writing.” I study the pockmarked walls again and decide they have been left this way on purpose, and thankfully so. They are stunning and warm, simple and inviting.

We do hike our volcano, climb up to the cross on a hilltop overlooking the town, stray into a church or two, but for the most part, this stay is all about wandering and wondering for me.

Antigua – so aptly named – is a reminder that we carry the past, both good and bad, with us always. The things we build may not last what the earth throws at them either, but what is left has its own beauty and power. Especially here in Antigua.

 

This is Not Thailand!

Tags

Antigua, CENTRAL AMERICA, changing gears, coronavirus, Guatemala, Southeast Asia, travel problems

The bags were 99% packed, and all systems were go for our trip to Southeast Asia on Wednesday evening. And then they weren’t. What changed? As I noted in my last post, we’d wavered a little on leaving for a long vacation in a place increasingly affected by the coronavirus outbreak, but all of our knowledge, intuition, and local contacts suggested that we were extremely unlikely to actually catch anything.

Including our flights! We’d already rebooked our return flights (a time-consuming and stressful task), which had a problematic Hong Kong layover. As the number of virus cases mounted, however, we began to rethink the seven regional flights we had booked and even our return via Tokyo. We didn’t have that many destinations, but many of our flights involved layovers back in Bangkok, and we started to eliminate some of them in an attempt to salvage our trip.

With every adjustment, we ran into a domino effect of problems. Eliminate Cambodia and the four planes associated with just that one stop? Oops, no flights from Luang Prabang to Danang a few days earlier. Spend more time in Chiang Mai? Nope; Laos was already getting short shrift, and what was the point of flying for over 24 hours to get to Asia and then cut our top destinations short?

Neither our friends on the ground in Thailand and Vietnam nor our families in the U.S. pushed us in any one direction, but there were plenty of signs that this might not be the carefree and fun vacation we had planned six months ago. We are not retired and have obligations at home, and we could ill afford a problem at any point with a return. Though getting sick was not even on our radar, getting stuck or, worse, potentially quarantined based on where we had been, was a worry.

It did us in. Call us wimps, but we wanted to really enjoy this trip and not just get through it. Thirty-six hours before takeoff, we pulled the plug. Before I canceled all the flights, hotels, guides, and drivers, we went online, searched for cheap fares to anywhere we’d never been, and bought tickets for Guatemala for one day after our original departure date. We didn’t even really have to repack the bags!

So here we are in Antigua, the old capital of Guatemala, where we landed two hours before we would have in Bangkok even though we left a full day later! It’ll be a short stay, but it’s a nice consolation prize for the trip to which we sadly bid adieu. For the next few days, we’ll speak Spanish and climb volcanoes, but we’ll be headed back to Bangkok and all of our other SE Asian stops in November if all goes well!

Buenas noches, all, and thanks for all the support throughout our decision-making process!

To Go or Not to Go?

Tags

Cambodia, coronavirus, Hong Kong, Laos, Southeast Asia, Thailand, travel dilemmas, Vietnam

It’s countdown day 10! A mere week and a half separates us from takeoff on our long-awaited flight to Bangkok and Southeast Asia. We drained a couple of frequent flyer accounts for some cushy Business Class seats, and we cashed in a bunch of hotel and credit card points for a string of comfortable hotel stays throughout Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

We made plans to meet several blogging friends; we have tours set up and hikes charted out. I’ve practiced my Vietnamese greetings and refreshed my internal map of Bangkok’s streets and the way to a fun rooftop bar. I’ve even started a little pile of clothes and toiletries, shoes and sunscreen, plane entertainment and sundry supplies.

But with each passing day this week, our trip becomes a little more untenable. The Wuhan, China-based coronavirus is putting a growing crimp on things, and it’s not because we have any real fear of getting the disease. Our concerns now are that we could get stranded in a country that has decided to close its airports (we route home through Hong Kong, for example), or that once in Southeast Asia, we will find things shuttered or devoid of life.

A few days ago, we were still gung-ho on going. Fewer crowds – yay! We are not going to China itself – no problems for us! The news media always overblow everything, we rationalize. Today, we are beginning to worry for real. Bangkok department stores are scanning temperatures, Hong Kong’s streets are emptying out, a few more cases are cropping up in the countries to which we are heading. What if …? we keep asking ourselves on a burgeoning list of topics. Wahhhhhhhh!

Unwinding the trip may take as long as planning it out. Can I shift everything to fall; will we be safely out of the woods with the virus by then? Will my airlines and hotels let me make changes or cancel without massive fees? Where else might we escape in these two and a half weeks we have carved out of our busy schedules?

I’m curious to hear some of your thoughts. Do we stay or do we go?

Battling a Mountain

Tags

29029, endurance events, Everest, hiking, jesse itzler, Seven Summits, Snowbasin, Utah

Foreword I

I have barely posted here for months, and the biggest reason for that has been my laser focus on something that no one but my husband has known about since early December of last year. For those few souls who have missed my words, here are more than 5000 of them crammed into one post for you to enjoy! (Or skim, or skip …)

Foreword II

How can I possibly explain this folly?

There was nothing – nothing – I liked less than walking up a long, steep hill. I hated to breathe hard, I hated to sweat, and I hated the feeling of being physically and mentally uncomfortable. I do love to hike, though, and I do love to stand on top of mountains, so I have suffered through these grueling, awful ascents for years. I walked slowly and breathed hard, but my modus operandi was to just keep moving. I was almost always slower than other people going uphill, but fortunately, hiking involves plenty of flat, rolling, and downhill sections, where I walk quite briskly, so it has been hard for others (and even me, to some extent) to tell that I completely sucked at walking uphill. I have hiked very, very high (to almost 18,000’) and I have hiked for a very long time (almost 3 straight weeks), but in the midst of those achievements and others, I have been 100% miserable and cranky with myself on every long, difficult climb.

December 4, 2018

So, what do I decide to do when I read an article about an event that involves walking up 2310 very steep vertical feet in the middle of August in high-altitude Utah? But wait, let me expand. I was not just going to walk up that steep hill and then mosey down a few hours later and have a beer. I was going to try to walk up Snowbasin Mountain thirteen (that’s 13) times over a 36-hour period for a grand total of 29,029 vertical feet. In the debut of this event in Utah last summer, only 35% of the participants went all the way. And they probably never truly loathed or were bad at walking uphill. Oh, and I’m going to pay someone thousands of dollars to make this happen.

To put this in perspective, event founder Jesse Itzler told us that elevating one’s heart rate and shredding one’s leg, core, and even arm muscles for 36 hours is like running nine average-speed marathons back-to-back, or doing 2.5 Ironman triathlons in a row. I’ve never done more than a 10K race. When you reach a normal cruising altitude in a jet, look down; that’s the height we are going to have to climb. On my most ambitious hiking days, I’d maybe go up 4000 feet. When I decide to finally test my limits, could I not be a little more reasonable?

I read the article at 7:30 am in Outside Online and almost impulsively sign up immediately. I send the link to my husband, J, and write “I want to do this!” I am so pumped. The year of the event will contain a big birthday for me, and I have been feeling a need to show myself I can still cut it, to go BIG, to escape the limiting thoughts and negative self-talk that have consumed me in the last few years. I click the Chat button and bombard Matt, VP of Sales, with questions. I head out for the day, brain afire, and return afterward and call Matt to talk more. I crunch numbers, I read reviews and testimonials online, and I get more fired up.

This opportunity to face many of my personal fears and weaknesses should be my 60^th birthday present to myself, I decide. And the significance of the number 29029 cannot be overstated. This is the height of Mount Everest – my dream, my fantasy, my obsession for years and years. (Surely you’ve noticed my header photo for the last five years!) I’d like to believe that I could still climb Mount Everest, and I still dream of it regularly, but at my age, with no alpine climbing experience, and no $50,000+ to spare, I have accepted realistically that this is not going to happen for me. The 29029 event lines up so beautifully with the biggest dream I’ve ever had for myself, and it now seems like a bargain basement way to test my physical and mental limits.

December 5, 2018

I’m still high, but I have to face the fact that I probably do not have the ability to do any of this. I have another conversation with Matt. I read more, calculate more, debate more, and then I decide to see what I can even do as a baseline. I try walking the length of one summit hike on the highest ramp on my treadmill (not even close to the real thing), after a full tennis match to simulate tiredness, and then I do all the calculations to account for altitude and slope and the necessary ride back down after each ascent. I figure I’ll need at least two hours per summit, and there are thirteen summits to do. I have 36 hours total, and I will need 26 hours just to walk it all with no major breakdowns. That leaves me with ten hours to sleep, rest, eat, pee, and deal with any screaming muscles, joints, bones, and mental collapses. I can do that!

December 6, 2018

But have I discounted the pain of a real climb? I get on the Stairmaster at my gym the next day and make it about 8.5 minutes before I feel my steps are shaky. I am breathing hard and sweating; I usually stop before this happens (typed sheepishly, but true). I get off and decide this event is likely not for me. Thousands of bucks to do something for 36 hours that I just hated passionately for 8.5 minutes?

Later that afternoon, I realize I can’t give up the whole event just because I am unlikely to finish it or even do well at it. I just wanna be with these people! Colin O’Brady (first solo trans-Antarctica trekker and all-around endurance badass AND exemplary human) has done this twice! Olympic sprinters have participated. NFL players. Duke’s Coach K has had Jesse Itzler speak to his teams. It’s a hell of a lot of money to “just be with these people,” but … can I perhaps lower my expectations? Can I just train as hard as I possibly can and go and do whatever I can? They say it’s about “you versus you,” not a race, and I can buy into that mentality.

December 7, 2018

I tell Matt I am wavering. He sends some testimonials by others – a woman who does the whole thing in Vermont, a different woman who doesn’t make it and still extols the event, a guy who trains his butt off (literally; he loses 45 pounds) and gets it done. Another guy who goes hoping to summit once and makes it up five times (and is thrilled). I am reinvigorated. Maybe I should go to just be inspired by all these people and do whatever I can.

Or maybe I really can train enough to do it all?! F— it – I’m in! I don’t even wait for Matt to respond to my last email; I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and push the Buy button. Holy crap; what have I done? I justify. I can get some money back if I withdraw by late February. Won’t I know by then if this training business simply can’t get me ready after years of half-hearted cardio?

April, 2019

Flash forward to the start of our training program. I’ve spent the last four months training for the training program. Sad but true. I’ve gone from ten minutes on the Stairmaster to thirty. I am regularly running hill repeats and trudging uphill on an inclined treadmill. I can now run about three miles at a conversational pace and have found my latest high-altitude hike in Bhutan quite manageable. Easy, in fact, which makes me feel much more confident. And now the real work begins.

April-August, 2019

I’ve become a running fool. My running shoes go with me everywhere. Georgia, Pennsylvania, Northern California, Boston, Arkansas. I run four, then six, then eight miles at a time. I run five miles to my health club, do six hours of stepmill and treadmill workouts indoors, then run the five miles back home. I experiment with on-the-go hydration and nutrition, seeing what I digest well and what upsets my stomach.

This is all well and good, but will it get me up a steep, steep mountain thirteen times in a row? All day and through the night? At 9000 feet of elevation? At up to a 47% incline? Nothing I can do will truly prepare me for this event, I feel sure.

Our trainer Brent says, “the bigger the base, the higher the peak,” and this becomes my mantra. The more miles I put on my legs and feet now, the more ready they will be to go high and far in late August. At the same time, he urges us to “train where you are.” There is an online group for participants, and many are wearing weighted vests and spending hours at a time on a stepmill or a real mountain. We don’t even have hills in Houston. Some are organizing outings to the event venue. Others are doubling the mileages and times. But I plug away at my own pace, trusting in Brent’s reasonable philosophy. At my age, I also have to think about preventing injury; what good will I be at the event if I go overboard now?

Mid-summer brings certain facts into focus. One moment of truth is a grim reality check: after a one-hour run on June 4, in stifling heat and humidity, I try to do the required hill repeats and then my hip mobility exercises, and simply cannot finish them. The incline at my small Houston hill is 40-60%, about the level of the toughest slopes at Snowbasin, and I think I will die if I have to keep going … and this is after only 1.5 hours of exercise. How am I going to repeat that infinitely longer hill for 36 hours? Really, I am a fool to think I can rack up all thirteen summits in just a few months from now. Perhaps I can crunch out five ascents … maybe, maybe go up seven times?

Then again, after I get in the car and come home, I think about how OK I feel after fifteen minutes, and that I might actually be able to go out and start again. Time will tell. But I will need to push myself a lot harder, and that’ll be tough given that I am feeling wasted, hungry, and tired all the time.

A month out from the event, I experiment with the advanced slanted treadmill at my gym. I set the machine at a 20% incline right from the start and walk up 2310 feet in 67 minutes at a fairly comfortable pace and heart rate. If only the event could replicate this! At this pace, I’d have time to ride back down and even take a short rest before turning back up the mountain. Of course, 20% is only the average incline of the real mountain, and the real mountain also has gravel, rocks, boulders, straw, and uneven earth. It has blazing hot days and 40-degree nights. It has sections at double these slopes … okay, so maybe I can still hope to finish in less than twice this time. A two-hour ascent will still let me take a few short breaks, but there goes any chance to actually sleep at night.

By the end of July and into early August, we are at the peak of our training. We have three straight weekends of multi-workout days – days when we run or hike or cross-train for eight, ten, or twelve hours straight. This has become my weekend life, but I refuse to fall into the endurance training rabbit hole. One day I get up at 5 am so I can get the training done and still throw a dinner party for visiting relatives that night. We stick to our plans for dinner with friends at other times, and I attack my food like I’ve just burned it and a few more days’ worth of calories off beforehand (I have).

I feel strong! As I go into the taper weeks, J and I head west to hike in Idaho and Utah for almost a week before my event. I take it easy on my hikes, and I watch my footsteps like I never have before. No turned ankles allowed right now. No sore knees or hips, please. At the end of the week, J drops me at the site. I am a nervous wreck. Ready physically, but how will I ever know if I have the mental fortitude to climb up, up, and up, over and over again, all day and all night for the next day and a half.

I listen to the pre-event speeches, tucking tidbits of information and advice away for tomorrow, settle into my tent for a night of tossing and turning, and set my alarm for 4 am. Tomorrow at 5:45, we will strap on our headlamps and start up the mountain.

***

We start at 6 am, in the dark, with headlamps illuminating only the rocky patches of ground beneath us and the already-dusty trail shoes of the hiker in front of us. Perhaps this is good; we have seen the first one-tenth of the hill from the base, and it is beyond daunting. At about a 47-degree slope, the pitch makes our heartrates jump and our calves scream from minute one. When we see the first sign, meant to be helpful but certainly not, it says we have climbed a mere 500 feet. Most of us stop for a breather, a drink and a few hundred calories about 300 vertical feet later, at Aid Station 1. Taking care of our hydration and nutrition will be critical in the next day and a half as we burn thousands of calories and sweat out our water and salt stores with every ascent.

In spite of my careful plan to hike only at my own comfortable pace, I reach the first summit quite a bit faster than I had calculated. As I take the 15-minute ride back down to the base, I feel good. Strong and optimistic. I’ve just saved myself a good 45 minutes over my estimates, I calculate – time later for a nap or a real meal or a mental or physical breakdown. “Stay ahead of the clock,” we were advised. No time to gloat now; I need to keep moving and not even think about those extra minutes I’ve stockpiled.

Getting off the gondola and heading back to the starting chute is an eye-opening reminder that this is not going to be a walk in the woods. Our group of 220 hikers has spread out, and as I approach the board where we brand each ascent into the wood, I don’t see anyone I know, so I trudge to the starting line alone and begin to labor uphill on my own. It is light enough now to see, and I soon realize that the first 750 feet of this hill is perhaps the longest and most difficult stretch of all. It’s a sobering discovery; every time I start over, I’m going to have to find the will to walk through serious discomfort and exhaustion.

But Jesse and other speakers have addressed just this. “Be where your feet are,” we were told. I need to think about nothing but the next step – not the section above this, not the last hike where a steep jumble of boulders almost caused me to tip over backward, certainly not the fact that I have finished only one hike out of thirteen. One-two-one-two, click with the right pole, clack with the left. Breathe calmly; don’t outpace your breath. For me, a key will be to not stop between stations. Others are walking faster than I am, huffing and puffing, churning uphill past me. Minutes later, I am passing them as they bend over their poles, catching a breath, stretching a calf muscle. Already I feel a Zen-like calm, an autopilot rhythm that is propelling me up the mountain.

Last night a few speakers suggested we not put in earphones, letting our own thoughts and the nature around us fill our heads. This was heresy, I thought at the time; my music and my GPS watch have been my security blankets for months of training. Now I realize I have forgotten to push the Workout button on my watch for the first lap and the early part of my second. But by now I know my breath and heart rate patterns; I don’t think I’m exceeding a safe zone, and somehow the lack of music really IS keeping me focused on my feet.

And so go laps 2, 3, and 4, which I decide to do without any real breaks even though my pre-event plan was to stop for lunch after three climbs. Our rewards come in two ways: ascent count and a summit count. We are going for all Seven Summits, and it will take these first four ascents to get me to the equivalent of Mount Kosciuszko (Australia’s highest mountain), the lowest of them all. When I descend after lap 4, I not only sear my fourth symbol into the scoreboard, but I receive a checkmark on the back of my white bib for my first summit.

I take a break from the afternoon heat and sun, stripping off several layers, eating a brief lunch, and switching out my socks. So far I am immune to many of the afflictions my fellow hikers are experiencing: blisters, chafing, altitude headaches, nausea, or intestinal problems. I attribute my early hardiness to hiking experience; I am used to using poles to push my way up a steep slope, my calves and Achilles tendons are accustomed to being stretched this way for long periods of time, and I am very consciously focusing on balanced hydration and getting non-irritating calories into my system.

I head back out for two more rounds, hoping to finish by dinnertime and before it gets dark again. Lap 5 is like most of the ones before it, but by ascent number 6, I am feeling a crash coming on. It’s becoming harder to take a deep breath, even while stopping at the aid stations, and my inner thighs are cramping whenever I stop. I am alternately hot and shivery cold, and I feel certain that my next sip of an electrolyte drink will make me throw up. Slow down, I coach myself; I’ve stayed ahead of the clock all day so far, and I can afford a very slow lap. “Just keep moving,” we’ve been told, “the tents and the lodge are your enemy.”

Somehow, I plow my way uphill for a couple of hours, my slowest hike yet, and collapse into the gondola. I’ve been on the mountain for over twelve hours now, the longest sustained heavy physical activity I have ever experienced. I am thankfully alone on this lift run as I moan and whine like a blubbery child in my own little capsule the whole way down. I think back to my initial goal for the event: 7 laps – one more than half – and still more than doable if I get a good night’s sleep and wake up able to locomote.

I stagger into the lodge at the bottom and drink good, plain, cold water. I eat the blandest real food I can find and settle into a chair before I give up for the night. People are headed to their tents for a nap or a full sleep, with a number of my early hiking buddies saying they no longer feel compelled to go the full way to Everest. I am feeling the same, but somehow I think I have some reserves left today that my friends do not. I sit for longer than normal and catch the eye of one of our coaches. He has run marathons and competes as a triathlete, and I pick his brain about the body’s ability to spring back from a low point like the one I am in. We talk for a few minutes, and when he leaves, I decide to get up and try one night hike; the HQ team has been saying that everyone should try one, and at this hour I’m sure there will be people on the mountain for me to walk with.

I walk stiffly to the start line and look around. The base area is quiet; a group hike has left about thirty minutes ago, too late for me to catch up. No one else wandering around looking for a companion? Nope, this is going to be a solo run; I’ve done a few of them, and in many ways, I’ve liked them better. The less chatting I do, the more I fall into a rhythmic trance and the less I feel the toil of my legs and lungs. But I soon realize this is a different animal being all alone on a huge mountain in pitch darkness. And speaking of animals, I hear noises. I hope that’s the hoot of an owl and not the howl of a coyote. A triangular flag marking the trail edge licks its tongue at me as my headlamp illuminates its flickering edges. Every stick on the trail seems to slither like a rattlesnake as I get ready to place my feet down over and over again.

I want to go slowly to keep my tired lungs under control, and I need to be deliberate with my footsteps among the stones and – higher up – boulders all over the path.  At the same time, I want to race to the next aid station to see other humans, to get close enough to others who can hear me scream if something should happen to me. I crest the ridiculous hill that takes me about a fifth of the way to the top and start to see the lights and hear the thumping rap music that’s been playing at the rest stop all day. I glance at my watch and am startled to see I’ve come up here as fast as I did on the very first fast lap, and this after my near-complete meltdown at the base a short time ago.

I take great encouragement from that and after a two-minute rest I’m back on my feet and starting the long 1.25 miles to the next station. I’m practically humming now, feeling wonderfully resilient and sturdy. I high-five and fist-bump the volunteers at the next waypoint and keep on trucking. I reach the summit under a star-studded black velvet sky and ride down in pure elation. I’m more than halfway done, I’ve reached the summit height of Mount Vinson (Antarctica), and I’m feeling strong and capable.

The roller coaster ride is continuing, though, and by the time I’m at the bottom contemplating one more ascent, I’m back in a trough. My neck hurts from looking down at the path for hours at a time. My upper arms are starting to ache from the pole use, and my legs are beginning to feel rubbery. I find a friend who wants to keep going, and we fall into step in silence. Just having her nearby makes me feel better, and knowing that this fit young woman twenty to thirty years my junior is on the same lap as me makes me feel proud of myself. We struggle uphill together, chatting briefly in the aid stations, and finally separating briefly as we each tackle the final rocky slopes on our own. Mount Elbrus (Russia) – check.

“I’m done for a while,” I tell her on the ride down. I’m not only physically tired but I’m mentally fried, and I’ve got to rest my head and neck more than anything else. “Not me,” she says, “I feel like I’ll be better off just going all night.” It’s after 1 am, and I stumble to my tent, frozen to the bone. My teeth are chattering uncontrollably, and my legs feel disconnected from my torso. I slip as quietly as I can into my tent. My tent mates are slumbering as I lower myself to the edge of my bed, wincing at the pain in my screaming quads, and peel off my filthy clothing. I re-dress in tomorrow’s hiking togs and take a futile stab at cleaning my dust-covered feet with a wet wipe before crawling under the covers. I’d hoped for more than a few hours of sleep, but it’s almost 2 am by the time I set my alarm for 4 and try to relax.

I must have slept because the alarm startles me, and I rise quickly to my feet to stave off any attempt to lie back down. No contact lenses going in at this hour; I throw on my glasses and hat, bundle up in a few more layers, pack my waistpack, and unzip the tent flaps in the chilly pre-dawn air. I walk alone to the base, already calculating my chances of finishing. I’m on the murderous first hill by 4:30 am, and by the time the sun has begun to lighten the eastern skies, I am already on the way down. I barely remember the climb at all; half-awake and fuzzy-headed, I have cranked out lap 9 like an automaton and picked up two more of the Seven Summits – Denali and Kilimanjaro – with little pain at all. I catch a glimpse of my nighttime friend in the lodge; on the lap after I left her, she pulled a groin muscle and is done, joining the scores of others who have dropped out of the event for all sorts of reasons.

Aconcagua is another quickie. I’m astonished at how awake I am now, and I turn out one of my fastest laps since early the first day. I’m beginning to visualize snagging all of these peaks, and I alternate between wanting to laugh out loud and sob. This is not a situation I imagined. Me? One of the oldest participants here, still walking strong, with no injuries or complaints of any sort beyond bodily exhaustion. I’m highly emotional as I get my last red check mark on my back, knowing that I only have to walk up two more times before I get the coveted red bib, the outward sign to all that I’m on my last ascent.

The hubris! Did I celebrate too soon? Each climb is no joke, and the euphoria I feel as I climb into the gondola at the top quickly dissipates as the truth sets in back at the bottom. “Only” two more until I get the last bib? Umm, that’s three more total, almost a third of what I’ve already done. And there will be no more peaks to bag between Aconcagua and Mount Everest; I’ll have to take comfort in simply branding my board each time I do one more lap.

I don’t remember ascents 11 and 12 well at all. I am slowing down, but only by about two minutes or so with each new climb. The red bib is nigh, and once again I feel an outpouring of emotion combined with some sort of hysteria, surely brought on by sheer exhaustion mixed with jubilation. I am truly filthy at this point, and I’m down to a sleeveless tank, trying not to torch my arms, neck, and face as I climb higher and higher into the thinner air. I’m getting reports of people dropping out, oxygen masks being applied, knees being wrapped, and stomachs being emptied at the top of the mountain.

Although I have not traditionally been good at blocking out negatives or dealing with pain, I plod on and before I know it, I have arrived at the next-to-biggest moment of the weekend. The event announcer sees me disembark the gondola for the 12^th time, doing a herky-jerky walk back toward the starting chute. I can barely extend my legs by now, my limbs heavy with lactic acid, my muscles aching and tight, my feet clenched in my trail shoes. An event volunteer ties the red bib onto me, wishes me well, and tells me she’ll see me in a red finisher’s hat when I get back down. It sounds so imminent, but the minute I enter that chute for the final time, I know this will be the hardest lap of all. Luckily for me, I have plenty of time, at least four hours to do what has never taken me more than two, even on my one very slow climb.

I try to enjoy that last ascent, pausing to snap (terrible) photos of the signs and a bit of the scenery. It’s impossible to capture the intensity of the slopes or the feel of the loose stones under my feet; I will never be able to truly convey the energy of the aid stations with their upbeat music and encouraging volunteers. I chat with everyone I see on that final lap, but I find myself alone and utterly drained on my final trudge up the relentlessly uphill fire road at the top of the mountain. As I pass the last ¼-mile marker, I see a hiker twirl slowly as if in a ballet and then crumple onto the gravel. I rush ahead to offer help or to send a medic back down, and only then do I fully absorb what I have done – climb just over 29,029 vertical feet, the height of Mount Everest from sea level, a feat that only 139 of us would eventually accomplish that weekend. From what I understand, I am the oldest woman to finish.

Of course, I’m tremendously proud of my effort over the 30-some hours it took me to complete this challenge, but I’m also unendingly grateful for the chance to have even done the training and, as I expected from sign-up day, to have the opportunity to spend a weekend with the kind of people who want to see what their own Everest looks like. Even those who did not make all thirteen summits fulfilled certain goals for themselves, and there was not a cynical or disappointed heart in the house that evening. I have no need to replicate my journey here, but I am a believer in the mission of the challenge. “I am strong. I am capable.” Colin O’Brady’s words to himself on his Antarctic crossing ring though my head. I have a very different notion of what I am made of and what I can do in this world. I have battled a real, physical mountain, and I have owned it. Time will tell what I make of that on the other hills of my life.

Two Fleet Feet Out the Door

Tags

outdoors, road trip, running, summer

I’ve largely disappeared online, and that’s mainly because both of my feet have been (literally) running all over the country in recent months.

My days have been filled with physical activity, and my time in front of a screen has correspondingly shriveled. There are a few things I miss about that (for one, my novel has been stalled at about three-quarters done for months), but I am filled with vigor as I travel across the country and put some ground under my feet at every stop.

With more to come on this topic later, I have been putting many miles on my running shoes the last six months or so. Much of it is hiking-specific training out on the streets, running paths, and trails both here in Houston and wherever I am traveling. It served me well in Bhutan, and I expect it to show even stronger returns during almost two weeks of hiking this August in Idaho and Utah.

There’s no better way to get to know a new place, or to poke into different parts of a known town, than to run or walk its streets and trails. Here at home, I’ve investigated new running routes many times a week, often in the very early morning (another new discovery for me!) because of the sweltering temperatures and humidity.

J and I have ventured out to other spots in our own state, like cute, little Brenham, historic Nacogdoches, and beer-lovers’ Shiner.

On my own, I’ve plied the usual summer roads to and from Georgia and Pennsylvania, as well as some little diversions en route:

More special trips included a glorious four days in Colorado where one of our sons lives with his wife, with lots of fresh mountain air and sunshine, family and good food. I learned that running at over 5000 feet of elevation is a snap compared with running in 90% humidity, and we all put in several solid days of hiking in the foothills nearby.

A four-day trip to the Bay Area/Marin County was another huge winner, with jogging and biking paths at every turn, as well as a chance to do some nice, long hikes, including the 15-mile round-trip Dipsea Trail, several 10-mile days in Golden Gate State Recreation Area and the Marin Headlands, as well as some city time, which of course included a walk over the Golden Gate Bridge and back.

I squeezed in a girls’ weekend in Boston where our daughter is living for the summer, and on Saturday we cranked out a 5-mile run and a follow-up 10 miles of walking in blissfully cool temps in the city, both excellent compensations for all the pizza, ice cream, wine, and lobster rolls we consumed in two days!

A four-day holiday work break for the 4^th of July found us in the oldest town in Texas, surprisingly charming Nacogdoches in the Piney Woods of the eastern part of the state.

I once again explored on fast feet by morning and at a hiking pace all afternoon for a few days here and in Ouachita National Forest in central Arkansas as we moved north. We finished off the weekend in Fayetteville and environs, once again relishing Northwest Arkansas’s natural beauty and quirky little towns.

When my feet have finally been propped up for the evening, I’ve tried to keep up with your blog posts and happenings. Some days I may have mustered a mere “Like” (or not, if you don’t have that button), but please know I have still been reading and keeping up with your adventures. The more I have focused on what is here in front of me each day, the less I have been able to keep up with social media. It’s been very freeing, and over time, any stress or guilt I’ve felt about it has dissipated as well. My Instagram time has contracted to nearly zero hours per day (and Facebook was already dead to me), allowing me to read blog posts, which I find much more fulfilling, as well as all the other literature I consume on a daily basis, while still spending much of my day out in the real world.

As summer and the tug to be outside wane, I’m sure I will reappear more regularly in this space and in yours. Meanwhile, happy summer to all from wherever I am at the moment!

A Little More Bhutan

Tags

Asia, Bhutan, Buddhism, happiness, hiking, Himalayas, kingdom, mountains, remote

I’m short on fully-formed thoughts about Bhutan. There’s no real story here, just some impressions that are as disjointed as my memories from this trip seem to be for some reason.

The flight into Paro. It’s a doozy. By some accounts, Paro is the third most dangerous airport in the world. On nearly every list, it’s one of the top ten scariest. I manage to get a window seat for the thrill of descending into that valley and twisting and turning to land on the runway at the bottom.

Are we gonna scrape?!

The prayer flags. I love a good mess of prayer flags. And by mess, I mean that joyful jumble of color, caught in the wind, sending good thoughts up into the universe. Added bonus when these vibrant supplications are attached to swinging suspension bridges, my favorite Himalayan mode of passage.

Church and state. Buddhism and its often cheerful monks are ever-present, a perennially appealing backdrop to life in the Himalaya, and they exist here in relative harmony with an elected government and a king (and his father), who are impressive stewards of all aspects of Bhutanese life. National happiness is a holistic goal here, with a balance always being sought among economic interests, environmental concerns, health, education, living standards, and psychological wellbeing and resilience. Noble ideals, seemingly well carried out.

Color and geometry. I’ve always been a sucker for Himalayan art and architecture in their native habitat. A mash-up of colors and shapes I would not abide at home makes me inexplicably happy in this part of the world.

Animals, animals everywhere. Temple cats, bridge and courtyard dogs, and a few stray cows to boot. Most are well-fed, and all are secure enough to sleep just about anywhere.

The landscapes. I went to Bhutan for the mountains and the trails that lead up through those elevated rocks and trees. I may not have gotten the trek I signed up for, but I got plenty of altitude, exercise, and other views. I could/should do a whole post on our day hike to the Tiger’s Nest alone; people find it fascinating, and it was a fulfilling day with a very special prize at the end. But … maybe some other day!

The Weather and I: Bhutan Edition

Tags

Asia, Bhutan, disappointment, hiking, Himalayas, trekking, weather

As I’ve recounted a number of times (especially here and here), the weather and I have a troubled relationship. Occasionally, we are the happiest of companions in everyday life and moments of adventure, but too often we are at odds, and the likelihood of weather-related disappointment seems to rise with the remoteness of my destination. Drop me into a place I’ve dreamed of for years, somewhere that costs thousands of dollars and double-digit hours to reach, and the tease of a few days of sunshine inevitably morphs into unseasonable cold or precipitation or both.

A long-awaited high-altitude trek in Bhutan was no exception. My pre-trip materials listed daytime temperatures in the 50s to 70s, ideal weather for some steep hiking in the Himalaya and sleeping in our tents above 12,000 feet for several nights. As the trip neared, however, my weather app showed numbers that were half the predicted temperatures, and I tossed an extra gaiter, a second pair of gloves, and a third layer of clothing into my duffel.

In our first few days exploring the capital, Thimphu, and warming our legs up on a few day hikes at 8-10,000 feet, we all breathed a sigh of relief as the cloud, shower, and snowflake symbols on our phones each morning proved totally inaccurate. As the days went on, we laughed, carefree and blissfully ignorant, at the crazy disconnect between what we were seeing with our own eyes and what the forecasters were suggesting. Our trek would be fine! The weather app clearly didn’t work in Bhutan. All of the prognostications were wrong!

Until they weren’t. We started a drive into the remote Haa Valley to begin the trekking and camping portion of our trip, and only an hour or so into our ascent to Chele La, a pass at 13,000+ feet, we were on slushy roads and enveloped in mist and rain, then sleet and snow. We slowed to a crawl – thank god, as I was terrified on the one-lane road with two-way traffic, switchbacking up and down the S-curves with no guardrails – and finally reached our small lodge for the night before the trek began.

We learned the next morning that the weather wouldn’t just make our trek miserable; it would cause the entire thing to be cancelled. I was crushed. Seriously heartbroken. I’d come to Bhutan for two main reasons – to hike to the Tiger’s Nest (a very successful foray – stay tuned for that) and to trek and sleep among Himalayan peaks like Chomolhari, Kanchenjunga, and Jichu Drake. Beyond that, my hiking mates and I had specifically come prepared for the possibility or rain and snow, so when we were told the horses and porters and guide were not up for the trek, we were doubly dismayed.

The next day’s eagerly-anticipated trip on foot became, instead, a slow and bone-jarring drive back east, past Paro and on to Thimphu again, where lower elevations might mean better weather. A frigid, wet night of camping along the Wang Chhu river did not initially bear this out, but our luck returned briefly in the morning, when the rain ceased and the sun came out for a solid day of hiking above the Punakha valley, a verdant expanse of pine forests overlooking lime green and yellow rice paddies below.  A little extra consolation was a chance to see Punakha Dzong, an impressive fortress at the Y of two rivers, site of the original capital of Bhutan.

My spirits rose. Surely we would wake to another balmy day in the valley, get in one more good, long day of replacement hiking, and finally be able to at least see Chomolhari and the string of mountains visible from Dochu La, the pass on the high road we would retrace as we returned to Paro yet again. We celebrated in our dining tent with beer, wine, and numerous rounds of 505, the Bhutanese card game we had learned from our guide the night before. My unrelenting (some might say unreasonable) optimism filled me with a bubbly buoyancy; our group’s courteous reaction to disappointment and our lack of anger and complaint were being rewarded. I’m prone to karmic explanations in everyday life, and being in Bhutan, coached daily on Buddhist precepts by our guide, had reinforced the idea that we get what we deserve.

A crack of thunder in the early hours of the next morning shattered that notion. Seconds later, a torrent of water lashed my tent, and I leapt to close the ventilation flaps. The rays of hope that had lulled me to sleep were as obscured as the plastic window out the front of my clammy abode. I stared past fat droplets of water to a low-hanging mist and abandoned any thoughts of an adequate hike again that day. We packed up the camp, walked desultorily on a short muddy path to a small temple (another in a string of temples that became poor substitutes for outdoor exertion) , and clambered into the van for the return trip over socked-in Dochu La. In ten days in Bhutan, I never once laid eyes on the high peaks I had come to see, never hiked a full, long day to collapse contentedly into my tent, ready to get up the next day, and push forward again, and again, over the 14,000-foot passes and through the rhododendron forests, high meadows, and rarefied air that I crave for years until I can get back to the Himalaya. It had been 6 1/2 years, and for all I knew, it could be 6 1/2 more before I’d get back to this part of the world.

The weather and I will always knock heads, it seems, but perhaps our guide, Sonam, was right when he said that karma does not mean good or bad luck; rather, karma simply takes us where we are meant to go or be, and in our case, this was perhaps the Punakha Valley, one of the most compelling landscapes in Bhutan and one that we were sorry we were going to miss because of our far-western trekking route. Maybe we needed to be present on the prayer flag-draped suspension bridge where one of our group members scattered the ashes of her late husband.

Or bonding with five new friends in a dripping tent, united in our shared frustration. Perhaps we were meant to visit the Sunday produce market in tiny Haa, a town and valley that only opened to outsiders in 2001, or the home and farm of our guide, where we ate breakfast and played darts with his elderly father in the yard.

Maybe we were just supposed to learn not to cast blame for decisions we might not have made ourselves, or to see that other treasures exist outside of the places we expected to find them. Maybe all I was meant to learn was that if the weather is the biggest of my problems, I am a pretty lucky gal!

More on Bhutan’s many charms in upcoming posts.

 

Aloha, Unknown Beauty!

Tags

beach, Hawaii, hiking, islands, misperceptions, Polynesia, sun, vacation

We put Hawaii aside in our minds years ago, dismissing it as a destination for people who didn’t like to be as active as we did. Old people, we thought. Maybe corporate conventioneers. Let’s use our fit and functional years to climb steep paths and take 15-hour flights and sleep in tents and apply for difficult visas, we reasoned. Hawaii will be there when we can no longer do all those things, when we want to go sit on a beach with an umbrella drink in hand.

What changed? I don’t know really; all of a sudden, we just got an urge to see Hawaii. It helped that our adventuresome son had recently raved about his trip, our lively parents had loved the place, and so many of our energetic friends had returned multiple times to the islands.

So, no, we didn’t get old or lazy, but we did have two big birthdays to observe early this year and had narrowed our celebration spot to Namibia or Hawaii (slightly different choices, I know!). Hawaii won.

We’re so glad it did. And we were so wrong in our previous thinking. Maybe some people hang out on beach chairs sipping tropical cocktails for a week in Waikiki, but we were able to find more than enough to do on two of the lush, green islands that make up this chain of volcanic dots in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

We started on Oahu. With the main Hawaiian airport, skyscrapered Honolulu, jam-packed Diamondhead, and yes, clichéd Waikiki on its shores, Oahu was routinely dissed by many friends who gave us travel advice. It’s too urban, too touristy, too congested, many tsk-tsked. But a close friend who knows Hawaii well convinced us to head directly out of Honolulu upon landing and hightail it to the quieter North Shore. A little research turned up more hiking options there than almost anywhere else in the islands, and we spent four days in an area with very little of the built-up feel of the southern shore or the other islands with strips of resort hotels.

We passed our days on a series of coastal trails, among them a long, sandy stroll to the northern tip, Kahuku Point;

a rough, windy walk out to far-west Kaena Point;

and a pine needle-laden path to a huge, old banyan tree and on to a World World II pillbox near Kawela Bay.

We ate from a shrimp truck, a local sandwich shop, and a 68-year-old shave ice stand in surfer-town Haleiwa while we admired the surfboards (and a few surfers, too – sorry, J) standing up against many a brightly-painted building. We watched those colorful boards in action, too, at the Banzai Pipeline, where young and old alike unfolded their tanned torsos in the curl of a huge wave pounding toward shore.

Our next stop was the Big Island, this one recommended by many who had found the land mass the most ecologically diverse and the “real Hawaii,” as we heard more than once. The first claim was easy to prove: in the next four days, we drove from lava fields to verdant gardens to ranch lands to desert scrub to one of the most serene and stunning beaches we’d ever seen. And back again, more than once, through these variations.

As we had on Oahu, we sought out some small communities, like Volcano Village, a street of about ten buildings near Volcanoes National Park, where we stayed in an old YMCA camp-turned-inn. After last year’s eruption of Kilauea, the world’s most active and dangerous volcano, parts of the crater rim drive were devastated and the breathtaking lava lake at Halema’uma’u crater collapsed and drained, leaving a vast field of dried-up, smoking lava.

The effects of Kilauea’s huge 1959 eruption are still eerily visible as well, making the visit to the park both mind-blowing and a little disappointing (in spite of our good fortune that its federal employees had kept it open during the government shutdown).

We also particularly enjoyed tiny Hawi on the northern edge of the island, where we caught an impromptu hula performance by a group of senior citizens and ate at a kitchsy restaurant that was part of Hawi’s rebound from ghost-town status in recent years. Near here, we took our steepest hike of the trip, picking our way slowly down a pitched, root-strewn path into the Pololu Valley that started with this panoply of warnings:

We felt secure enough in our footwork (and stayed hard to the non-cliff side!) and were rewarded with a misty, black sand beach … and then the long climb back up and out. It was the workout we were looking for, and the views may have been the most remarkable of the trip.

A shorter down- and uphill trail took us through the Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden just outside Hilo. Given its internet presence and lofty name, I expected a major tourist attraction but was very pleasantly surprised to drive in on a 1½-lane, S-curve road and find a magical oasis that was the result of one man’s 8-year effort to clear and replant this Onomea Valley hillside in the late 70s.

We had our nicest dinner of the trip in crisp and cool Waimea, Hawaii’s higher-elevation ranchland that felt a little bit Outback, a little bit Texas in its look and spirit. We made the drive from sea level to 3000 feet and back a couple of times, never tiring of the vistas in either direction.

On the Kohala coast, we happened upon the Ala Kahakai National Historic Trail, a 175-mile network of seaside walking paths that ran near our hotel. After hiking the section nearby, we re-joined the trail twenty miles down the coast toward Kona a few days later, where we wandered through Kekaha Kai State Park one morning.

We picked our way through clots of hardened lava for several long, hot slogs, rounding a corner every once in a while to a new viewpoint where, I must admit, I found myself saying “Oh, it’s just another beach.”

Nine days in paradise may have made me sound jaded, but Hawaii is far from ho-hum. There are so many brilliant flowers, so much ambrosia-like pineapple and other fruit, and so many postcard-perfect palm trees bowing down to white sand beaches that I can barely imagine the days when I thought it would be an uninspired destination.

I never really thought about the fact that I could stay in the U.S. and be in Polynesia at the same time, surrounded by South Pacific motifs and visages, Aussie and Kiwi accents, and signs and menus in Japanese, to mention just a few of the cultural treats throughout our travels. We made a point to try and see the “real Hawaii,” on two feet as much as we could, and we think we succeeded. We ate breakfast with barefooted surfers on the north coast of Oahu, had to nix a hike when the only parking was in a seedy neighborhood crawling with cop cars, and missed getting some musubi at a 7-11 when a guy out front decided to take his pants off, scaring us off.

But we also stayed at a couple of beautiful oceanfront hotels, watched the sun rise and set over palm trees and limpid seas, swam in the ocean, and drank coffee in a warm and breezy open-air restaurant every morning.

We spent our last day in … yep, Waikiki, and we loved the whole loud, lit-up place. J wore the Hawaiian shirt his dad brought back decades ago, I wore more sundresses in a week and a half than I have in years, and one day at the pool, wearing the pink and orange flowered flip-flops gifted by the hotel, I ordered my own tropical umbrella drink with no shame at all. Mahalo, beautiful state – we will be back for more!

A Snowy Beach Day on the Moon

Tags

desert, dunes, geology, moonscape, New Mexico, sand, White Sands National Monument

We drove, astonished, down the hard-packed road, a crust of white stuff on our right and a mound of it on the left. It was 70 degrees and sunny, but everything else suggested an Arctic landscape.

Leaving the car a few minutes later, the opposite impression was formed as we climbed a dune line under the hot sun, fully expecting the sea to appear as we crested the small hill. The heat, the snow, the coastal ambiance; where on earth were we?

You likely did not guess New Mexico, and we never would have either. But there we were, less than two hours outside of El Paso, Texas, getting the equivalent of a ski trip, a seashore vacation, and maybe even a short lunar excursion one day last weekend.

I read about White Sands National Monument a few months ago, and the stark beauty had pulled at me ever since. Quick, reasonably-priced flights from Houston to El Paso allowed me to convince husband J to get away for a long weekend to west Texas and New Mexico, where we started at White Sands and worked our way back east to Guadelupe Mountains National Park and Carlsbad Caverns.

The otherworldly dunes at White Sands did not disappoint. Spread across hundreds of square miles in the Tularosa Basin, the great white waves of gypsum sand rise and fall, in some areas burying yucca plants that fight back by extending their flowering stalks skyward.

Tufts of hardy desert grasses cling to the ground beneath, and even the occasional cottonwood tree perseveres, helping provide shade for the creatures that thrive in the desert. Shrubs and wildflowers add a spot of pale color here and there.

Driving farther into the park led to more wintry scenes, however, with higher mounds and long stretches of open sand unpunctuated by flora, looking every bit like powdery snow. We had much of the park to ourselves in early November, but we caught sight of a few sledders, walkers, and photographers as we trudged into the whiteness, noting any possible landmarks to guarantee our ability to retrace our steps, not an easy task in the monochromatic expanse.

Unlike most deserts, White Sands holds onto much of the water that falls during the summer monsoon season. It lies just beneath the surface of the sand, itself formed by the wind-whipped gypsum flakes that have been driven into this basin in the Chihuahuan Desert for the last 10,000 years.

The sand is as fine as that on a Caribbean beach, but it is also wet enough to pack down into roads and is much cleaner than the organic sand found on tropical beaches around the world.

It sweeps like whipped cream, then folds and gathers in ridges, shadows forming in the corrugated surface that turn it into anything your mind can imagine –  the Sahara, the Atlantic coast, a pockmarked moonscape.

This unspoiled preserve and all its permutations captivated me all afternoon. We stuck around for sunset, when rosy hues melted into cloudless blues, all forming a colorfully striped background for the now-pastel dunes in the foreground, and drove away reluctantly only after the sun had completely disappeared from this strange little patch of Earth.

Beyond Baobabs

Tags

AFRICA, baobabs, Indian Ocean, islands, lemurs, Madagascar, sailboats, sailing

“Why Madagascar?” I ask Lisa when she suggests I visit during her four-month anchorage off the coast of this Indian Ocean island. I’m thinking I might wait until one of her next few stops, in South Africa or maybe Namibia, to parachute into her floating world for a brief stay. But baobabs, the thick, upside-down African trees I’ve seen once before, are one quirky draw, and I am eager to interact in the wild with lemurs, the tiny primates that live only in Madagascar. Beyond the unique flora and fauna, however, I know little about this poor island nation and am unconvinced I should spend thousands of dollars and many days of my time to get to it for a week or so this summer.

I let the idea languish until I try to explain to my sister one day why I can’t get the idea out of my head. By then, I’ve found flights both ways using miles, devoured all the links Lisa has sent on the country, and read her enthusiastic reviews of Nosy Be, the biggest island off the northwest coast of Madagascar. I hang up feeling I have convinced my sister I should go … and then wonder why on earth I haven’t booked it yet! I lock it down that afternoon.

A few months later, I land in Hell-ville, the only real city on Nosy Be, meet Lisa and The Captain for the first time (a story in itself), and am whisked to their sailboat for the next week. I tried hard to include parts of the main island in my visit, but even though I am a pretty brave solo female traveler, everything I read says it is a very bad idea to try getting around there on my own. Once on the boat, listening to The Captain relate his own aborted attempt to travel there with a friend, I am glad I elected to simply stay on the water and see the smaller islands in the Mozambique Channel.

I throw myself wholeheartedly into the life aquatic. I pop up jetlag-free after night one in my rocking boat-cradle, stuff myself into a wetsuit, strap on a mask and a snorkel, and topple over the side of the dinghy for my first Indian Ocean swim, this time with sea turtles off the coast of Nosy Sakatia.

Photo Credit: Lisa Dorenfest

My underwater camera does not do justice to these majestic creatures, who munch a while on the bottom plant growth, then breast-stroke to the surface in graceful slow-motion, all within inches of us humans.

I’ve been here less than a day, and I’m already in another world, lulled by the sea, by the creatures and coral below, by a patch of jumping fish flashing in the sun above. I feel extravagantly far from home.

A diurnal rhythm emerges in the following days – up with the sun and usually out with the local fleet in the morning and, later, drinks on deck as the same orb sets, igniting the sea and coastline. The local boats are things of great beauty and ingenuity. Often simple, wooden canoe-like vessels with home-made sails, the boats and their dexterous sailors skim the ocean in search of fish, as a means of transportation among islands, and even as small floating purveyors of goods like fruits and vegetables.

Day’s end comes earlier here, not too far south of the equator, and by 6 pm, we have front row seats for the sunset show in various anchorages. Whether it is illuminating the water, a nearby landmass, another boat, or just the shiny metal parts of ours, the sun is our nightly source of art and entertainment, a tangerine-pink glow that deepens in front of our eyes before our watery world plunges into darkness.

In between wake-up and a climb back into my cozy berth below-deck, there is a new kind of magic every day: the bestowing of gifts upon the mpanjaka (island queen) on still-primitive Nosy Mamoko. A hike almost the whole way around that rocky island with friendly local Thom, the epitome of patience as we scramble for hours over slippery rocks and I somehow snap the sole off my shoe halfway through.

More snorkeling, this time off Tanikely, where we spy vast schools of flat, round fish and a huge red snapper. On the more developed Komba, I play a one-on-one soccer match with a six-year-old while Lisa is busy taking and printing photos of the islanders, and there I also meet an enigmatic Italian man who has singlehandedly transformed life on one end of the island over the last twenty-five years. We hike along the beach and up into the hills, and miraculously find a crusty baguette (we are both bread fiends) at the end of the day on the dusty main street.

I seek out the lemurs, the bright-eyed prosimian primates that live only on Madagascar. I’ve been lucky to see lemurs in a research facility before, so I know the little imps will be friendly. I am not, however, wholly expecting to become their jungle gym. I should know that the little bits of banana I carry to attract them will mean lemurs on my arms, my shoulders, and my legs, with the capper being a lemur fight on my head, my hair snarled beyond redemption.

The country is achingly poor, among the top ten neediest nations in the world, and the markets in Hell-ville are busy but ramshackle, a shocking amount of litter covers the main city shores, and local officials have no qualms about asking visitors for “little gifts” at the docks or the airport.

At the same time, the town feels comfortable and open to outsiders, and the true treasures both here and on the smaller islands are the people. We are met with shy smiles and sincere attempts to communicate everywhere we go. They are a beautiful and reserved bunch in general, sometimes even wary, but we feel absolutely welcome everywhere.

It’s a surprisingly rich cultural experience for such a short time in the country; we even luck into a brass band parade on Nosy Komba one morning and just miss getting to attend a festival on Mamoko the day before.

By the time I leave, baobabs are but a backdrop to this beguiling series of islands that broke off from the African continent millions of years ago. Much of an African nature remains, but Hell-ville and some of the more established islets also feel distinctively Polynesian, vaguely Arab, certainly French, with a healthy dash of other Southeast Asian flavors thrown in. It’s a mysterious and heady mix, and our small but unhurried explorations make for one of the most absorbing trips I’ve ever taken.

A Leap of Faith

Tags

circumnavigating, Indian Ocean, leap of faith, life dreams, Madagascar, sailing

This travel story begins the way many do when I relay the news of my next trip to family and friends. Because there are times I travel on my own, to weird places, in strange ways, I sometimes get furrowed brows, worried shakes of the head, and occasionally outright outrage. This time, the questions start the same way but expand from there.

“I’m going to Madagascar!,” I announce.

Oh, cool … where is that again?

Why on earth do you want to go there?

Is J going with you?

Aren’t you afraid to fly alone (through Qatar, Ethiopia, Madagascar, and everywhere else on so many flights)?

And then:

You’ve never met the people you’re staying with in person?

You’re staying on a sailboat the whole time?

Wait, you’re transporting two suitcases full of stuff that they’ve had shipped to you?

The where, the why there, the inevitable husband question, and the fear query are typical. My mom is just a normal nervous parent when I fly so far away alone. My husband makes me locate a hospital on the island I’ll be near, just in case. My sister mentions very large insects. A startling number of my friends remain aghast at my globetrotting without a husband in tow.

But this time, almost everyone also wonders how I can trust my hosts, people I have never met beyond WordPress or email, with some musing that the sailboat parts and other products I have jammed into two extra bags could be full of cocaine or other contraband and that my “friends” have been playing me for a mule. By departure day, with its usual last-minute frenzy and edginess, even I am writing a thriller in my head about what happens to the naive American woman who gets thrown into a grim prison cell in Addis Ababa or Antananarivo and finds her blogging friend to be a carefully-constructed online personality designed to lure her into a life of smuggling.

But as always, my imagination has simply run wild, and the trip turns out just fine.

Actually, it’s way more than just fine; it is perhaps one of the most unique forays I have made into the world, a dreamlike seven days of sailing off the northwest coast of Madagascar with the inimitable Lisa and the Captain, whom I have come to know over the past four years through Lisa’s blog and, later, email.

I figured I’d like Lisa in person as much as I did through her words. We had discovered much in common: prior financial careers, years in Chicago, tomboyish childhoods, and wanderlust, of course. Through our correspondence, the list grew. One small example: as I readied a surprise gift of Frango mints and pondered other goodies to take my hosts, I asked what they might like as a treat. Frango mints, Lisa replied immediately, another sign that our friendship was meant to be. Seeing our identical flip-flops lying side-by-side on the deck a week later (or uncovering our shared obsession with toast) no longer seemed surprising; we were clearly sisters in a previous life (in a royal family, we agreed, laughing for the thousandth time onboard).

Lisa is the first blogger I’ve met in person. I used to recoil at the idea of people “making friends” with others online; I found the whole idea both ludicrous and sad. Why did these people have to turn to the internet for friendship, I smirked. Why would anyone fly anywhere, let alone for 48 hours overseas, to meet a stranger? I get it now. There was something about this virtual friendship that seemed solid and real, and when we met, it was as if we had known each other forever. The Captain began to refer to us as the “bumble bee convention” as he tried with varying levels of success to interrupt our constant buzz of conversation. I realized they (and certainly he) needed to take a leap of faith on me as well. What if I showed up to live for a week in a small, confined space with them and turned out to be a complete pain in the ass or someone on my own nefarious mission?

Madagascar itself was a distinctive destination that demands its own upcoming post, but I think the biggest impression of the trip was what life as a full-time circumnavigating sailor looks like. Some parts I adapted to very easily. I never got seasick, and I felt totally comfortable living, eating, and sleeping 24/7 on a sailboat. (I am actually land sick now, a full two days after leaving, a fate some people suffer for months afterward, and so far I seem to be one of them …) I loved the cruiser social life, motoring over to other boats in our dinghy for cocktails and appetizers and meeting people from all over the world who have become friends as they make their way around the globe. I could appreciate the minimalist way of life that is part of having one’s entire existence fit into a 15-meter vessel, and I fell easily into languid afternoons of “nothing to do” as we floated in our anchorages off a series of islands.

There were other parts of life at sea that would wear on me after a while, I think, and I marveled that Lisa and The Captain have been onboard their tiny home for five years now. I might get used to pumping a toilet 40 times every time I used it, but I was pretty eager to return to a gleaming bathroom with a spacious countertop and a shower. I suppose I would grow accustomed to washing my clothes in a basin of soapy water, agitating it with my feet, but I couldn’t wait to throw my salty, sandy clothes in a machine when I got home. I am fond of my husband, but I shudder at the thought of spending a 21-day passage at sea with him and only him, arguing non-stop over things large and (more likely) small. Last but not least, I think I would be terrified of those long sea passages, days and weeks of seeing nothing but ocean, sleeping in shifts and imagining ocean liners bearing down on me as I tossed about in frothy waves.

Lisa and The Captain not only do not fear or feel annoyed by these facts of life on a sailboat; they embrace and are invigorated by them. Lisa related her feelings of deep happiness on a solo night watch in a dark sea, Fabio never seemed to tire of cooking on a tiny stove or tinkering with the boat, and while they can squabble like any shore couple might, there is clearly an abiding affection between them that has survived or perhaps been enhanced by an interconnectedness born of true reliance on one other.

If you do not know Lisa, sail over to her blog and get a taste of her floating life and non-traditional choices. She and I talked a lot about what we want from life, the dreams we had or have for it, and what we have done or not done about it. In short, she has seized her opportunities while I have made only tentative grasps at mine. Yes, I saw another new country and I experienced a tiny taste of life on a boat, but I also saw what life has available for us if we are brave enough to really reach for it. This trip will ultimately reveal that the leap of faith I took to get there is a tiny one, and that some people are brave enough to jump into much more unknown waters. Thank you, Lisa and Fabio, for a matchless vacation and, beyond that, a vision of life lived to its fullest. You are both inspirations, and I would gladly take seven flights there and back to visit you again someday!

 

Lisa, lemurs, Lexie

0 for 2

Tags

aging, disappointment, failure, hiking, Mount Mansfield, Mount Washington, mountains, New Hampshire, summits, Vermont

Over the hill, past my peak, on my last legs, going downhill: all of these hackneyed expressions for aging floated through my mind – quite appropriately for a mountain hiker, I might add – as I tried and failed last month to reach the summits of two of New England’s highest hills.

J and I were on an 8-day road trip around New England, starting in Stowe, Vermont. Our goal was to hike for at least five of those days and attempt to reach the tops of Mt. Mansfield, the uppermost point in Vermont, and Mt. Washington, whose elevation of almost 6300’ is the highest in New Hampshire and all of the Northeastern U.S.

The first was in our grasp – easily in J’s, and probably in mine with another thirty minutes of good, hard slogging. With a slightly too-late start, intermittent rain, and my exasperatingly slow speed on the steeper, rougher ascents, though, we found ourselves on the final pitch above Taft Lodge in the early afternoon, calculating how long it would take to finish getting up, maybe slip and slide back down, drive back to the hotel, take showers, and waltz into a wedding on time.

Our guess was “too long” and we were correct, showing up only shortly before the bride came down the aisle. While I was very exasperated with myself for this failure, and remorseful at holding J back, I grudgingly gave myself props for kicking off the hiking boots after all those hours and managing high heels for the remainder of the day and night!

Between Mansfield and Washington, we did not just sit around eating Ben & Jerry’s, Cabot cheddar, and maple candy (and looking in vain for cider doughnuts) although those fuels may have been consumed in larger quantities than usual. But we worked them off, and more, on other trails in the two states, all in an effort to prepare for the big one – a hike up Mt. Washington, an assembly of tree root- and boulder-strewn paths with about a 4000’ elevation change to reach the summit. As it turned out, all those hours going straight up and down in the woods may have burned me out.

Juggling my absolute desire to at least BE on the top and to reach it on my own two feet, I vacillated on a plan. We contemplated going up on the first cog train of the day even though everything we’d read said we were going to need 9-ish hours to climb up and back down, and this would delay our start. We toyed with hiking up and catching the cog back down, but that’s the only ticket they will not sell you because there is never a guarantee the train will run if the weather changes suddenly, and it often does. Attempting the hike first and failing might mean we’d not see the view from the top at all as the trains stop running at 2:30 pm.

Dilemmas, dilemmas … and we’d already shot our chance to take the cog train the day before because we just didn’t want to rush through our shorter hikes and other rural sightseeing. We were there to relax and enjoy the scenery as well as conquer heights, we reminded ourselves.

And so we didn’t conquer heights, at least not fully and on foot, the way I’d wanted to. J didn’t even care that he hadn’t reached the summits, which he could have readily accomplished; he was thrilled to simply be out in nature and exerting himself. I, on the other hand, radiated disappointment and felt an impending doom, a portent of trail failures to come. I was always the hiker; I’d walked up iconic mountains all over the world, and J got dragged along the first few times. Now he was whizzing up the trails while my backpack felt heavier, my knees more quivery, my confidence shakier.

“It’s the journey, not the destination,” say books, friends, and inspirational posters. Bah! I enjoy the woods; I love the fresh air, and I adore walking all day long. But I don’t pant and scramble, claw and sweat for an entire day just for exercise or for fun. When I work that hard, it’s for a peak, or at least some target. By the time I realized we would not summit Mt. Washington on foot, I set the goal of simply getting above treeline, but we failed – I failed – even at that, spending hours and hours in the long green tunnels that characterize a lot of eastern hiking. We’d been wrapped in the woods for four days straight at this point, and I was sick of it. The forests that I generally love began to close in on me, and then my thoughts did the same, rendering me a crabby old lamenter of my departed youth.

We had ultimately elected to take the cog train that morning, which was a consolation prize of sorts. While it probably cost us the chance to chug to the top under our own power, I’m thrilled that we saw the summit views and meandered on the upper slopes for a short time on one of the sixty or so clear days the mountain gets per year. Score one after all.

 

Three for the Road

Tags

countryside, family travel, Italy, road trip, San Gimignano, Siena, Tuscany, Volterra

There have been many contenders, but currently perched untouchably atop the podium of road trip competitors is Tuscany. I consider myself a bit of a driving tour connoisseur, having motored through almost every state in the mainland U.S. and all but a few countries in western, central, and eastern Europe. My top criteria for road trip nirvana are all met in Tuscany: smaller roads, little traffic, eye-popping vistas around every corner, and one after another enchanting hill town just often enough to get out and stretch the legs.

Our own little corner of the Tuscan countryside lies just outside the small town of Casole d’Elsa; like many other communities in the area, it’s a medieval hamlet up on a hill with a stone fort, narrow winding streets, and a variety of small shops, eateries, public buildings, and homes.

We can walk there from our pastoral lodging … or not. The Tuscan landscape encourages relaxation and just being, and we spend plenty of time with a bottle of wine, a few snacks, and a view of layered hills covered in spring flowers.

When we do stir, we have a panoply of other towns to visit, and first up is Volterra. A walled city of Etruscan origin, Volterra retains its city gates, an acropolis, and the foundations of ancient temples from that era, as well as the usual Roman ruins. We visit right after breakfast and ascribe our unanimous election of Volterra as our #1 hill town, in part, to that fact. There are few crowds, the town is spotlessly clean and well-cared for, and the views from the main piazza are swoon-worthy. We very much get the sense that the town belongs to its residents; while catering to tourists through shopping (mainly alabaster, the city’s chief product) and eating venues, Volterra feels very “real” and unperturbed by the infusion of visitors.

We leave Volterra by mid-morning for San Gimignano, a town we have very high hopes for given its uniqueness as the setting of multiple high towers that erupt from the rolling Tuscan knolls. Our anticipation builds as we pass a whimsical red sculpture encircling a view of the hills and, later, get a sneak peek at the walled town and its pillars from afar.

As we approach the triple-walled city (also from Etruscan times), we get our first inkling that this is no Volterra. We start to see large tour buses winding up the last few kilometers to town. We pass crowded parking lots and wonder why people are parking so far away. We inch closer in order to drop at least my parents at one of the main gates but fear we may never find them again amid the growing hordes of visitors.

San Gimignano has eight gates, a fact that will soon play a role in our small family group getting separated from each other. We end up parking in one of the lots we had just pooh-poohed and allow son T to walk into town while my parents and I wait for a shuttle bus. Big mistake. T enters the city at a different gate than the one we are dropped at, and we all, in our separate parts of this tourist madhouse of a town, wonder how this will all play out with no means of communication.

The two groups decide on their plans: our group of three takes the easy route and plops right down at a table near the main city gate and orders lunch. Group 2, the impatient T, ponders. He stays put for fifteen minutes at his gate, wanders nearby for another quarter hour, has a dawning of comprehension about the relative immobility of Group 1, then hightails it through the city to what he guesses is the main entrance. He is correct, and he finally approaches, panting and hot, just as lunch arrives. Disaster averted, but we’ve had an unlucky start in the Manhattan of medieval Tuscany.

Unlike its larger neighbor, Volterra, San Gimignano actually feels much busier and more populous. It is later in the day, and even the sleepy-headed tourists are up and out now, so part of the bigger feel here is likely due to the visiting crowds. Nevertheless, the architectural uniqueness adds to the big-city impression. From about 1200 AD on, San Gimignano became the site of two centuries’ worth of competition between its wealthiest families, with these rivals striving to build ever taller tower houses. By the end of the Medieval period, there were some 72 of these stone skyscrapers, and 14 of them remain today.

As we leave town after a long and crowded stroll, we question whether we should try to squeeze in another city visit today. Oh, hell … my parents are only in their mid-eighties; we might as well make them walk another few hours today! But really, there is no arm-twisting involved, and we set off for the largest place of the day: Siena.

As we enter the town, the streets are not crowded, and the tourists seem to have left for the day. We easily find a parking garage that says “Cathedral Parking.” Great luck – the church is, in fact, our main target this afternoon! We begin to walk in the direction of a few other people and marvel at our good fortune to be here at such a quiet, peaceful time.

Until we realize there really should be more people. And that the 5-minute walk Google maps has over-confidently promised us has now been going on for more like 12-15. We blame it on my mom and her slow-but-steady pace. Like many mothers, she is regularly accused of dallying, too much window shopping, not paying attention to signs, and anything else delaying progress, but she is actually not at fault today. No, it appears we have simply parked at the very far end of the city, and as we wend our way closer, other visitors do materialize, and we finally find ourselves in the large square in front of Siena’s imposing black-and-white striped cathedral.

We are too tired to really enjoy it. My dad finds it garish, and the rest of us think it’s okay. We are impressed with the stacking of the black and white marble to heights that seem unimaginable in the days it was built, and we very much like the chairs that are available for us to sit on. After a few minutes of taking in the now-familiar Catholic furnishings, we gather the energy (and my worried wits) to go back down (the slippery marble stairs with no handrail) into the square for another short rest before making the lengthy walk back to the car.

It’s been an exhausting day, but we make the short drive home and rally with a Tuscan toast. A plate of cheeses and breads, a bottle of very local red (right from the property), and a Vernaccia from San Gimignano are appropriate refreshments for the early evening, and we sit on our patio overlooking the hills we’ve driven all day. Tomorrow is another day in paradise, and we have no agenda. Either way –  eventful or unhurried – we all find Tuscany to be the star of the trip.