You Meet the Nicest People on Vacation

My eyes open slowly a giant wall-window lets in the bright, bright sun.  If it weren't for the immediate pain that surges through my temples, I'd think this was paradise.  

Through the window there's a pool with jets streaming over a waterfall.  A couple sit in the hot tub and a long bar winds around to a door to the outside world.  

The outside world doesn't seem to exist.  The sun is so bright that nothing can be seen through the door.  Over the walled yard are a few palm trees swaying in the wind. 

I've spent myself again this weekend.  It was Aspen all over again.  Substitute swing dancers for environmentalists.  Sub beaches for snow.  My body can't really take so much anymore.  Too many hangovers--I think I'll swear off drinking (again) for good.

I spend the rest of the day alternatively laying out by the pool to faithfully work on my tan and dozing inside when it gets too hot.  Its so nice to feel hot again. 

After another exciting dance on Saturday, I finally talk someone into giving me a ride back to Miami Beach.  This time I'm not encased in a gated Boca Raton community, but in the Environment Florida staffer flophouse.  I head over to the beach, which is quiet and more ntaural then what I remember for Miami Beach.  When I've recovered again, I jump on the bus and head down to South Beach. 

When I jumped off the bus, the same feeling that overwhelmed me that I felt when I emerged from the metro in LA.  I felt at home.  

It's gotten worse.  The more I trave, the more pieces of me get left in each city.  I find things and people to love and I grow roots.  When I leave each piece of me I left behind tugs me back, so that now I feel happy and unhappy in each place.  Sometimes I feel that it's better not to travel.  Not to know who you're missing.  Never be able to close your eyes and feel the warm sand or see the view from the top of Mullholand Drive.  Not to know four walls that feel like home.  

The only solution is to travel more--to visit the places and people where the roots pull me.

Thank God for 4 weeks paid vacation.

I'm sitting at Tapas Y Tintos on Espanola Way.  I used to come here 2-3 times a week and I never had one visitor to South Beach that I didn't take here.  The manager and bartender both remember me.  My espresso martini tastes the same.  And when my friends arrive and we sit down for dinner and the flamenco I don't think there's anywhere else I'd rather be. 

I ask Adam to hire me to work in Miami again, half jokingly, half for real.  That dream will have to wait a year or two though.  

And who knows?  By then my heart may have taken root in Boston.

Almost Abroad

Just when I'm thinking I'm loving standing still, I start itching to travel again. My new posters just came in for my apartment--luscious Cote d'Azur landscape, a 1950's tourism poster for Mexico and a view of LA's cityhall from Olvera Street. I finally got my library card and found out that the JP library is known for it's travel section, so I picked up Mexico, A traveler's history and La Revolucion. I've subscribed to new travel blogs and obsessively ask anyone who's been about beaches in Mexico.

The time (or budget) for travel abroad hasn't come yet, but I figure Miami is darn close. Every year this weekend is the South Florida Lindy Exchange. Since moving I've gone from host to hostee, but it's so great to return to Miami and feel at home again. There'll be the normal dancing all night, but I'm most excited to feel the humidity again, to see my old bartenders at Tapas, to watch the sunrise on the beach, to chat with the characters on Lincoln Road.

I think it was my move to Miami Beach in the first place that started my wanderlust. I packed up everything, got dropped off in what was, granted, the same time-zone, but a 24 hour drive away from anything that I knew. Spanish was the first language. Palm trees didn't signal vacation, they were your landscaping. The clothing, scarce and the parties, huge.

For this northeastern girl, I might as well have been in South America. That's the thing about Miami, you're so close to dangling off the edge of America, that you may have well not be in America. The papers are filled with news of Cuba and even the tourists seemed to adopt their own special 'Miami' personality now that they were on vacation.

Bring it on.

Whirlwind Tour 

It's been an eventful past 2 months, even if it hasn't involved old cathedrals and great art and I haven't had  a spare moment to post.  So here's a reflection on the whole and the end of 2007. . . .

Now that I'm in LA, Miami seems a world away.  People like Lea, Yeshi, Izzy, might as well live in Oz.   The life that became such a familiar, well-worn (and well-loved) grind is so faded in my memory that I barely miss it.  It was an amazing two seasons for my office.  I really came into my own as a director.  I ran a record breaking, movement building, campaign winning office and didn't run myself into the ground.  

Then I left it all behind.  Europe, which was the opposite of well-worn to me, is actually a world away.  It was definitely the trip of a lifetime.  I probably stressed myself out during the trip a bit much, but in the end the memories of the sunrise on the Charles Bridge, the drive across the Romantischer Road, the dances in Budapest, the nightlife in Barcelona all still set off the happy receptors in my brain.  And now I feel better knowing that there will always be another trip, another vacation, another time to travel.  

My homecoming was also sweet.  Living at home wasn't the experience I thought it would be.  I reconnected with old friends and spent lots of quality time with the family.  My mom, who once forbade me from ever moving home again after her sister's kid moved back in with his wife at the age of 30, cried when I left.  

I also loved Philadelphia.  That city is fantastic and I would never mind living there.  And I turned that damn canvass office around--they're all over the top 5 lists and the canvassers still call and text me all the time.  I really was sad to leave.

Aspen was a trip as usual.  Craziness definitely ensued.  I wore my silk red dress to gala night, got lots of complements and promptly blacked out and had to have my old Massachusetts boss pay for my cab 5 blocks home.  I did a lot of hot tubbing and drank hot toddies.  I stayed up all night the last night talking philosophy and canvassing with a dude from Arizona and drank a bottle of champagne.  I went dancing with the head of the entire organization.  I made it home in one piece.

The drive out west was fantastic.  It was a whole part of the country I never had seen before--Arkansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona.  Even, California for that matter.   New Mexico was breath-taking.  The music and civil rights history in Arkansas and Tennessee was cool.  The mountain drive in Arizona was scary and beautiful.  

And now LA.  I spent my New Years Eve at work.  I cooked a mediocre risotto and rang in the new year at a small soiree--Nando, Drew, Alejandro and myself.  We drank our bottle of Cava from Barcelona and watched the ball drop.  My heart sank a little as I realized that everything I was watching on the television had actually happened 3 hours earlier.  Los Angeles is really a surreal place and the time difference is only the beginning I'm learning.