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!

A Dinner to Remember

Tags

cultural differences, dinnertime, family, Greece, memory

I am traveling this week between my old and new homes, so I will be lazy and recycle a story of a dinner I will never forget for this week’s photo challenge.

***

My first real connection with the wider world started with a little goat, a katsikaki, as it was called in the tiny arid villages of central Greece. I was a teenager at the time, on my first trip out of the United States. I had just spent a few weeks at a Greek Orthodox camp on the western shores of the country, and now I was traveling into the heart of the Peloponnese with my yiayia and papou to spend a week at Papou’s childhood home.

A distant relative was driving, and as we crawled along the rutted and twisted roads of Arcadia, my grandmother told me stories and taught me Greek in the back seat while the men sat up front, smoking silently as we rode. The road dipped and curled, backtracking endlessly upon itself as we climbed and descended the mountains and valleys. Although the windows were down, it felt as though we were looking through dirty glass as the dust swirled around us and the brown scrubgrass, muted green olive trees, and hazy summer sky melted together in a miasma of July heat. The car seemed to float across the landscape, its progress slow but steady in the oppressive warmth and constant thrum of cicadas and other chirping insects.

When she was young, Yiayia said, she had been rich and pretty and courted by many wealthy Greek suitors. She talked of trips on the Orient Express and her engagement to a young shipping magnate who had given her a silver ring encrusted with diamonds to herald the connection between the two aristocratic families. But that union was not meant to be, as my headstrong grandmother threw over the young scion for a dashing and hardworking immigrant new to America – my Papou.

It was his village we were riding to – a remote enclave of some 100 people, isolated and poor, deep in the heart of the mainland. Even the name conjured up images of ancient, black-garbed peasants, gnarled olive trees, mangy scrounging dogs, and mule paths that were now used as roads. Thoughts of the Orient Express, or even Athens, lay irretrievably far away as we pulled into the town square, a tiny area in front of the church. Old women emerged from the tiny stucco houses to wrap themselves around Papou’s neck – the long-lost son of the village. The widows keened over my grandfather’s arrival, but the children and young adults turned their attention to me – a blonde, green-eyed teenager in a jean skirt.

The week passed in slow motion, with morning trips up the hill to fresh water wells and afternoon gatherings in the tiny square for coffee and too-sweet pastries. Knots of old men and widows clustered in the streets, and farm animals emerged from under the houses to roam the village by day. The goats were the ring leaders, the billies bullying and the ewes taking up camp where they wished. Their babies, the katsikakia, were still innocent and irresistibly darling. The little one that lived under our house was my favorite, with its narrow head and silky ears. It scampered on the slender legs of a fawn and craved affection like a puppy as it moved its soft body into my legs. I spent hours with the tiny kid, hiding in the cool stone pen under the house, traipsing along with him to the well, and feeding him extra morsels of food away from the watchful eyes of Aunt S and Uncle T, my elderly hosts.

Finally, it was time to leave the village and return to Athens. Our bags were packed, the car was checked for the return drive, and goodbyes were said throughout the village. Sweet little Aunt S set the table with her finest belongings and spent the afternoon cooking a farewell feast for my grandparents and me. The house was festive; delicious aromas filled the air and the adults were cheerful as they sipped their retsina and smoked companionably on the grapevine-draped porch.

We took our seats at the table and were touched at the time and expense our poor relatives had invested in this meal. It might be years before American visitors came again, and S threw everything into making our last night special. The wine continued to flow, the small plates were passed, and S left to bring in the main course. She walked through the blue-painted door with a huge platter in her hands and a look of pure pride and happiness on her face. She came straight toward me. Puzzled, I glanced at my yiayia; the adults were always served first here. Aunt S beamed; “To katsikaki sou! …your little goat!” Stunned, horrified, nearly hysterical, I looked back at my grandmother. “Smile,” she hissed. “Say thank you … and eat it.”

I grew up that day, choking down this token of my relatives’ love and respect for me and my grandparents. They had given to me what I loved most in that tiny village and, as wrong as it all seemed to me at the time, it remains a hauntingly strong memory of that first trip away from home.

Ten Feet Out the Door

Tags

family, family travel, gathering, Weekly Photo Challenge

Every few years, our family of five eschews traditional gift-giving at Christmas time. Instead, we gather in some far-off location where we can just be with each other without the distractions of errands, other friends, or holiday madness.

Epidaurus, Greece

Long before we started this tradition, we carted our kids around the world as they were growing up. When I look back now, I can’t imagine how we herded three children under ten (with suitcases) through the radiating streets around the Arc de Triomphe to catch the rush-hour metro. I am in awe of the mere idea of trekking and camping with five teenagers (our three and two friends) on the Inca Trail. I cringe to remember my 6-year-old pushing and shoving with a friend on the edge of a chasm in the Dart River area of New Zealand. And I have photos to document the times we pulled over to capture some striking scenery and ended up with one boy or another watering the local flora on the side of the road. (T alone has sprinkled five continents, I would guess.) Ten feet out the door was not an excursion for the meek; it was a major production and involved the assembling of a lot more than just people. Back then we had to gather passports, inoculation records, tiny backpacks, snacks  – and more often than not, our wits – as we set off for new places.

Serengeti, Tanzania

As the years passed, the kids got busy with activities and college and their own lives, and my husband could never get away as much as I could to travel. I started to travel alone – either completely solo the whole time or just on my own until I met up with a trekking group somewhere. Even as some of my neighbors clucked disapprovingly, I grew to really relish my time alone, and I tried to book at least one and sometimes two trips a year during my work breaks to explore somewhere my husband didn’t care to go.

Iguazu Falls, Argentina

But as much as I enjoy the adventure and peace of wandering the world on my own or in small numbers, the gathering of my brood to travel somewhere new is the greatest gift I can imagine. This year, our gathering spot will be Colombia, and I can’t wait to have our ten feet all together once again!

See some other great takes on the Weekly Photo Challenge here!

It Started with a Little Goat …

Tags

family, goat, Greece, Peloponnese, Vasta

My first real connection with the wider world started with a little goat, a katsikaki, as it was called in the tiny arid villages of central Greece. I was a teenager at the time, on my first trip out of the United States. I had just spent a few weeks at a Greek Orthodox camp on the western shores of the country, and now I was traveling into the heart of the Peloponnese with my yiayia and papou to spend a week at Papou’s childhood home.

A distant relative was driving and as we crawled along the rutted and twisted roads of Arcadia, my grandmother told me stories and taught me Greek in the back seat while the men sat up front, smoking silently as we rode. The road dipped and curled, backtracking endlessly upon itself as we climbed and descended the mountains and valleys. Although the windows were down, it felt as though we were looking through dirty glass as the dust swirled around us and the brown scrubgrass, muted green olive trees, and hazy summer sky melted together in a miasma of July heat. The car seemed to float across the landscape, its progress slow but steady in the oppressive warmth and constant thrum of cicadas and other chirping insects.

When she was young, Yiayia said, she had been rich and pretty and courted by many wealthy Greek suitors. She talked of trips on the Orient Express and her engagement to a young shipping magnate who had given her a silver ring encrusted with diamonds to herald the connection between the two aristocratic families. But that union was not meant to be, as my headstrong grandmother threw over the young scion for a dashing and hardworking immigrant new to America – my Papou.

It was his village we were riding to – a remote enclave of some 100 people, isolated and poor, deep in the heart of the mainland. Even the name conjured up images of ancient, black-garbed peasants, gnarled olive trees, mangy scrounging dogs, and mule paths that were now used as roads. Thoughts of the Orient Express, or even Athens, lay irretrievably far away as we pulled into the town square, a tiny area in front of the church. Old women emerged from the tiny stucco houses to wrap themselves around Papou’s neck – the long-lost son of the village. The widows fairly keened over my grandfather’s arrival, but the children and young adults turned their attention to me – a blonde, green-eyed teenager in a jean skirt.

The week passed in slow motion, with morning trips up the hill to fresh water wells and afternoon gatherings in the tiny square for coffee and too-sweet pastries. Knots of old men and widows clustered in the streets, and farm animals emerged from under the houses to roam the village by day. The goats were the ring leaders, the billies bullying and the ewes taking up camp where they wished. Their babies, the katsikakia, were still innocent and irresistibly darling. The little one that lived under our house was my favorite, with its narrow head and silky ears. It scampered on the slender legs of a fawn and craved affection like a puppy as it moved its soft body into my legs. I spent hours with the tiny kid, hiding in the cool stone pen under the house, traipsing along with him to the well, and feeding him extra morsels of food away from the watchful eyes of Aunt S and Uncle T, my elderly hosts.

Finally, it was time to leave the village and return to Athens. Our bags were packed, the car was checked for the return drive, and goodbyes were said throughout the village. Sweet little Aunt S set the table with her finest belongings and spent the afternoon cooking a farewell feast for my grandparents and me. The house was festive; delicious aromas filled the air and the adults were cheerful as they sipped their retsina and smoked companionably on the grapevine-draped porch.

We took our seats at the table and were touched at the time and expense our poor relatives had invested in this meal. It might be years before American visitors came again, and S threw everything into making our last night special. The wine continued to flow, the small plates were passed, and S left to bring in the main course. She walked through the blue-painted door with a huge platter in her hands and a look of pure pride and happiness on her face. She came straight toward me. Puzzled, I glanced at my yiayia; the adults were always served first here. Aunt S beamed; “To katsikaki sou! …your little goat!” Stunned, horrified, nearly hysterical, I looked back at my grandmother. “Smile,” she hissed. “Say thank you … and eat it.”

I grew up that day, choking down this token of my relatives’ love and respect for me and my grandparents. They had given to me what I loved most in that tiny village and, as wrong as it all seemed to me at the time, it remains a hauntingly strong memory of that first trip away from home.