Posts filed under 'Vacation'
has my heart
The last few days of cooler weather and earlier sunsets have me nostalgic for the summer that’s all but slipped away. For long nights on the deck. For meandering walks through the neighborhood. For fireflies and hoses and ice cream on a Wednesday evening. There was all of that this summer, and there was a perfect weekend in the northwoods, too. One I won’t forget soon.
Kevin and I drove from Chicago to the south shore of Lake Superior, to meet my family for a night of camping. (Note to self: camp with my parents more often. Their version of rustic is one that I can definitely get behind.)
Then we went into Minnesota, up along the north shore of Lake Superior—the shore I know like the back of my hand.
on a road trip
Kevin would be in L.A. the week before the Fourth of July. So, we set our sights on a road trip up the coast over the long weekend. Kevin picked me up at LAX, and we drove north along the coast, where the endless blue Pacific slipped from the pristine beaches of Malibu, studded with surfers and life guard stands, into golden, rolling hills and rugged coastline.
Our first stop was Big Sur, and we got there just in time for sunset. An orange sun slid down through the trees and over the ocean, and we ate at Big Sur Bakery, on the front porch, with a votive candle flickering between us.
instead, silence
I didn’t mean to be gone so long.
When we came home from a long weekend in Palm Springs, I planned to post here within the week. But, instead, silence. And I don’t really know why. It’s not that I didn’t have anything to say about the weekend. To the contrary, I had plenty to say, but nothing seemed to leap from my mind to the screen.
definitely the latter
Happy new year, friends. I’m a little late, I know—five days to be exact. My excuse is that I was ringing in 2011 with a long weekend in Austin. But I’m here now, ready for 2011—and ready, too, to tell you about Austin.
Vacations, I think, tend to fall into two camps. There are the trips to places where you could never imagine living, which makes you love the place all the more, for all the ways it’s different from where you do live, for how truly away you feel when you’re there. And then there are the trips to places where you feel instantly at home, where you’re sure you’d live a happy life, which allows you to relax and leads you to do the same kinds of things you’d do at home, like grocery shopping and neighborhood wandering and sofa lounging.
then, paris
.
I’ve been dreaming about Paris for a long time—images conjured from things I’d read, photos I’d seen, movies I’d watched, food I’d eaten, wine I’d sipped. I was dying to go. So, when we laid our plans to go to Santorini, I batted my eyelashes at Kevin, who easily agreed to tack a stop in Paris—my first trip to Paris—onto the end of the trip. Once we were in Santorini, as our time there slipped by, I started to worry. Would Paris live up?
And then it did. In a way that made my heart swell and my eyes blur. In a way that is still knocking around my head. In a way that made me stop dead in my tracks, look around, and wonder: is this place for real? In a way that made me want to shop in the food markets—to bring a fresh piece of produce up to my nose and inhale deeply; to sample a slim slice from a wedge of sharp cheese; to tear a nub off a freshly-baked baguette before tucking it into the crook of my arm—and to cook, to bake. In a way that made me long for a stop at a boulangerie to be a part of my everyday, for a sidewalk cafe to call my own. In a way that made me feel more stylish, more worldly—more in it.
the life
As I write this, we—Kevin and I—have just said au revoir to Paris. Tucked into my seat on an Air France flight headed toward O’Hare, moments ago, I peeled away shiny, airy layers of a croissant, purchased at Paul and smuggled onto the plane, letting the buttery flakes melt on my tongue. Next to me, Kevin took big bites of a beignet oozing with thick chocolate. This decadent breakfast seemed the perfect cap to a few days in Paris, which were preceded, incredibly, by twice as many days in Greece. But I’ve gotten ahead of myself, haven’t I?
This vacation, planned for months and months, crept up on me at the end of this summer, after a string of very busy weeks, when quiet moments were rare, when we seemed continually on the go—for work, for fun, for the sake of the brilliant weather. So, August slid into September, suddenly, and before I knew it, I was heading home from a business trip, only to pack another suitcase. But packing for Santorini (!) and, after that, Paris (!!), is much better than packing for a business trip, of course.
patterns & traditions
We spent last weekend at Kevin’s grandmother’s house in Grand Beach—a little lakeside town just over the Indiana-Michigan border. Grand Beach is only an hour’s drive or so from the Loop and it sits along the coastline of the same lake, but its tall, swishy, sunburned prairie grasses and its rolling hills and its fleet of golf carts, which commingle easily with cars on the roads, and its turreted vacation homes, many wrapped with wide porches, make it feel like it’s a world away from Chicago.
We’ve been going to the house for one weekend a summer for a while now—long enough to develop patterns and traditions. Kevin’s parents usually drive out on Thursday or Friday, settling in and stocking the house with groceries. Kevin and I usually jump in the car after work on Friday, arriving just in time for a quick cocktail on the deck as the big sun sends a brilliant twinkle across Lake Michigan as it dips below the horizon. Then, it’s off to Timothy’s, a restaurant with screened windows and a piano player. It’s always packed on summer weekend nights.
it was a tie
Oh, dear. Somehow, a week has slipped away since my last post. You’ve been there on your side of the computer and I’ve been here on my side, but the space between us—this little site—has been silent. Which is funny, because my real life has been anything but quiet. It’s been a busy (one might call it “crazed” or perhaps even “frantic”) week, but in all the right ways. We spent a long weekend in Minnesota, way up north on Lake Superior, visiting my grandparents. Details and recipes and photos from the trip will be along shortly, but before that, I have news.
On Saturday, we staged the Second Annual Blueberry Picking Contest of the North. This year’s competition was fierce and included the following contenders:
on wine country, by both of us
Kevin’s always been here on this site—the man behind the camera, at times; the guy proofreading before the thrilling moment when I press “Publish”; a character in the stories; and, nearly always, at the table to eat the food that I post about. But in Napa, over dinner one night, I suggested a jointly-authored post. To my surprise, he said yes. (Actually he said he thought that, hundreds of posts in, I’d never ask.) So here we are, the two of us, each with our take on our time in wine country—which we split between the Napa and Sonoma Valleys.
wanderlust + chick peas
Oh, dear. It seems I’ve got a serious case of ants in my pants. Or let’s call it wanderlust, maybe. Yes, that’s better—more sophisticated, altogether grown up. Wanderlust. Whatever you call it, I’ve got it. It all started in Boulder. We were there last weekend for a wedding and, though I’d been there once before, the town thoroughly charmed me.
From the lively earthiness unfolding all day long on Pearl Street to the foothills that ring the town—punctuated by flat sheets of rock, jutting up into the sky (flatirons); from the stalls after stalls at the Saturday morning farmers’ market to the never ending games of croquet in my friends’ childhood backyards; from a serious commitment to beers to the little girl in the park asking her mom where she could compost the paper cup in her hands: it was my kind of town. I could get used to this, I thought.