When can you let down your guard when you travel? In your hotel room? At passport control? Never?
The tea was hot, the cream seemed fresh as I shared my digestives with Alec, the terrorist. I’d been waiting for him in the Dover tea shop for twenty minutes, and now we sat huddled at the table, eating biscuits like grateful refugees.
Originally written for Westminster College’s Travel Writing class, Fall 2006
The sharp pork, corn, and chili aromas from tamales filled the air as the tour group stood in front of Los Angeles’ Union Station looking over at Olvera Street. “Let’s meet back at El Paseo at 11:30 for lunch,” said Janice, our guide. “El Paseo,” a woman on the tour said, deep in reverie. “I used to dance there in the ‘50s.” Maria Morca was in her 70s, but she kept the elegant posture of a flamenco artist. “Olvera Street was a prestigious place to dance 50 years ago, “she added.
Originally written for Westminster College’s Travel Writing class, Fall 2006
“You can fall in love at first sight with a place as with a person.” Alex Waugh
This isn’t the Greece of my 2006 calendar. The Greece of island beaches, Melina Mercouri swimming in her underwear, little white houses with blue roofs, Zorba dancing with his arms up. Where I’m now standing is a forest of rock, gray-and-yellow stone pinnacles that are streaked with rain, age, and bird excrement. And many of the pinnacles are topped by monasteries.
Originally written for Westminster College’s Travel writing class, Fall 2006
I had our 25th wedding anniversary all planned out. Tom and I, our three sons plus a girlfriend, would head off to Ireland for two weeks, rent a van, shop, research our family tree, visit megalithic dolmens and the Cliffs of Moher, eat big Irish breakfasts . . . “. . . and go caving,” said Tom.
Originally published in The Nome Nugget, Summer 1995
I always thought it would be ideal to live six months of the year in one place and the other six months of the year in another place. I’d have a trailer down in Tucson for the winter and I’d have a summer cabin in a lovely northern, wooded place. You know, something like in the movie “On Golden Pond.”
Originally published in The Nome Nugget, Summer 1995
Blueberry season is almost over in Nome. It hasn’t been an easy berry-picking season for us Nomeites with weeks and weeks of rain. You could hear it in the murmurs at the post office, you could see it in the listless faces on Front Street. We
were teased with one sunny day and then plunged into dark storm for weeks. Berry buckets hung on nails, berry dreams were dreamt as we tossed and turned. And for me, day after day in a small apartment gets longer and smaller with three small boys.
Originally published in The Nome Nugget, Summer 1995
It’s been a quiet week in Nome. The sun’s coming up closer and closer to lunchtime now and it’s risky business walking downtown. We got a little bit of snow and then it got cold, the powder blew away, and a slick hard film coated the entire town: black ice. Chiropractor weather. Lousy footing for trick-or-treating. I’m probably not the only Nomeite who’s taken a bad fall on the ice, either. I had the right boots. I was taking the proper mincing steps. But I fell hard on my left hip just the same right in the middle of the street where the taxis and ATVs had rubbed the ice down silky smooth. I’ll admit that at that moment I was feeling a bit depressed about living in this little town by the sea. But for under $20 you can get some items in our stores that can push those cold-town blues away. They’re plastic. They come in purple, lime green, neon yellow, and bright pink. They’re sleds!
Originally published in The Nome Nugget, Summer 1995
As you read this, I’ll be unpacking in an apartment in Anchorage. And while the family is looking forward to malls and Kentucky Fried Chicken for six months, my heart tells me we’re doing the wrong thing for winter. We should have stayed put in Nome. “But there’s more to do in the winter in Anchorage,” I’m hearing. And, “You get great concerts and shopping and there’s always the zoo!”
Originally published in The Nome Nugget, Summer 1994
On my mother’s recent visit, she asked me when the mail would arrive at the apartment. “We don’t have home delivery,” I said. “No home delivery?” she said, as if I had said Nome had no food or water. “You mean you have to go down and get it yourself?” Yes, I told her, in Nome we have to go down and get the mail ourselves. Actually, it was a shock to me, too, when we arrived last spring. Until then, I had always been able to sit in my house on any day, rain, sleet, snow or dead of summer heat and wait for some poor soul to drop it into my mailbox whatever someone in the world decided to send. Through the ice storms of Ohio, the gummy heat of Galveston Island, or a really cool American movie classic, all I ever had to do was wait. But now the shoe is on the other foot. Now if I want my mail, I have to go get it.
Originally published in The Nome Nugget, Summer 1995
I’d like to think that Captain James Cook was the kind of guy who gave some serious thought to the names he gave Alaskan geographical features on his voyage here in 1778. I’d like to picture him considering the ambience, the weather, and the personality of the place, and then carefully matching up those characteristics to his list of English aristocrats. But it probably wasn’t like that at all.