If there’s one thing my family taught me, it’s how to travel on a budget. We camped on our vacations or stayed with relatives (avoiding hotels). We also cooked on our own food on the road. The goal was to see as much as possible with a limited budget. We did okay because we did end up traveling a lot. We took a cross country road trip when I was eleven, went to England three times before I turned 14, and traveled through Europe when I was thirteen.
My parents are professors, so they always liked to go to historic sites and often spent hours in museums. They also love to hike. In our trip across the country, our goal was to see as many national parks as possible and we hit some amazing ones: Yellowstone, the Black Hills, and Yosemite are the ones I remember the best. In between, we ended up spending many hours in our VW bus on the road. When we got bored with our books and each other’s company, we would pick up a hitchhiker. The hitchhikers always had great stories to share about their time on the road, and were usually very entertaining.
Traveling on a budget usually meant having some unusual experiences. I learned that roadside food in Greece is spanokapita, that rice takes forever to cook on a small stove at high altitude in the Colorado mountains, that you get really wet when a hurricane hits the Outer Banks, and that the Jack Rabbit bus line in Iowa does not count heads after stopping at a rest area (I had to chase after the bus).
When I compare notes with friends, I realize that I missed quite a few quintessential American experiences. I never went to Disney World or amusement parks. We never ate fast food. My parents didn’t believe in child centric vacations, but took vacations that they enjoyed that they hoped we would to. But I don’t feel like I missed out. In fact, I spend most of my vacations traveling a lot like they did (minus the cook stove), and hope to teach my son that you don’t have to spend a lot of money in order to see the world. And in fact traveling on the cheap means you get to see a lot more of it.
May 27th, 2009
| Posted by Meredith | 2009 Debs, Family, Meredith Cole, Posed for Murder, Travel, Vacation
| 8 Comments
I never was much of a traveler. I’m no good at packing, I like my OWN bed and my OWN house (and heaven help you if you keep me up past my bedtime… and that’s Pacific time, thank you very much), and on top of all that, I’m such a contented homebody that I don’t feel the need to go elsewhere. (Until I have a couple of glasses of wine, and then suddenly I’m a world traveler in the making… “Why DON’T we go to Argentina next year??”)
But even a grumpy troll like me manages to relax and enjoy myself from time to time, and here are five of my favorite travel memories to prove it. (I can’t say they’re my top five, because I can be very forgetful in small patches, so there’s a good chance I have a lot more favorites.)
1. Istanbul, Turkey. My parents, my little sister and I had traveled to Turkey to attend my brother’s wedding. We were staying at a little tiny hotel in the Sultanamet area, near the Blue Mosque and Topkapi Palace. The days were hot and slightly full of bickering, but one night, my mothers, little sister, and I sat at the tiny rooftop restaurant (all the food was prepared by the waiter), sipping wine and relaxing. It was cool, and a fog had settled on the city. Across the square, we could see the spires of the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sophia coming up out of the fog like lighthouses. The smaller mosque across the street from the hotel began their call to prayer, and we all just sat and listened and were mesmerized as the sound echoed around us, as it had done for hundreds of years.
2. Ballycarbery Castle, County Kerry, Ireland. Driving the Ring of Kerry in the southern part of Ireland, we diverted from the main path a bit and came across the ruin of an ancient castle. It was blocked off by barbed wire, but many someones had tied the wire up and helpfully supplied a little bridge so the curious rule-benders could explore anyway. We climbed among the ruins and walked the narrow staircases and stared up at sky through what had once been the home of a nobleman and his family.
3. Cave tubing, Belize. Wearing insect repellant that melted the print off the label of my sunscreen, we hiked through rainforest for 40 minutes to get to a launch point. We then floated down caves that were like the real life version of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. (Those ride designers were pretty talented guys.) For a while, it rained on us. I had two or three millisecond-long episodes of being amazed that someone was pointing a light exactly where I wanted to look, before remembering that I was wearing a helmet light.
4. The Butler Arms Hotel, Waterville, Ireland. Since we traveled at the end of the tourist season, we were basically the only people at this sprawling, gothic-feeling inn. With the help of a couple of pints of cider, the place might as well have been the lodge from The Shining. We explored the darkened hallways and the creepy terrariums, waiting for ghosts to spring forth from every corner. When we came down the stairs into the lobby after finding an open door at the end of one hallway, the lady at the front desk said, in the manner of a true horror film, “You’ll get lost up there.” It was deliciously eerie. (Although probably only on a dark, rainy October night. I’m sure it’s lovely in the summertime.)
5. New York, NY. Everything we’ve ever done there. I’m sorry, I can’t narrow it down. I love New York. I’d never been until I was 29 years old, and I was sure I wouldn’t like it. But I loved it and felt at home immediately. Although I must say, a recent highlight was seeing “Billy Elliott” on Broadway and hanging out backstage afterward with our friend, actor Greg Jbara (who just won a Drama Desk Award and is nominated for a Tony… cross your fingers for him)!
(Oh, and unofficial #6 would be staying at Dromoland Castle in Ireland, where the bar/lounge/fancy-Irish-term-for-t is in a turret of the castle filled with porcelain King Charles Spaniel statues.)
So tell me, what’s YOUR favorite travel memory?
~ Katie Alender
May 26th, 2009
| Posted by Katie Alender | New York City, Travel, Vacation, fun
| 10 Comments
Just before we’re leaving for spring break, I hear back from my editor that her response to my edits will be complete two days after we arrive in South Beach. And would I be available for a phone chat? This is nobody’s fault; just the way things keep turning out for me. I sort of keep believing the myth that writers have control over their work hours. But even though I sent her my responses to her edits two weeks earlier thinking that was plenty of time for us to work out a few minor details, that was me thinking I’m the only writer and mine is the only book my editor has to deal with. Additionally, she tells me that the art department told her they would have a book cover for approval, which will need to be approved vacation week since the catalog is going out that week.
So I pack my laptop and we head to South Beach which is hot and sunny and full of people watching distractions. The first two mornings, running on the boardwalk with my daughter we pass: a bare-chested older overweight man speed walking in a pirate’s hat and doing Jennifer Aniston arms (that’s when you do little arm circles with your arms pointing out at 90 degrees from your body and we call it Jennifer Aniston arms because we read in a glossy magazine that it was the exercise she did to keep her arms trim); a body building woman in a hot pants and stilettos, smoking a cigarette; a Hasidic family with eight kids, the parents both talking on their cell phones; a dyed blond, botoxed and bloated lipped woman with gravity defying balloon-boobs carrying one of those little Hamster-type dogs (also in stilettos); as well as scores of Latinos and Europeans punctuated by aging hippies in frizzy gray dos.
The afternoons on the beach I toss a football with my son, do yoga with my husband and daughter (and a few of the cabana boys who ask to join) and then plop into a lounging chair and watch the seagulls and the man in the pink thong sunbathe.
The third morning I wake up and wave everyone off to the beach without me, wondering how they will adjust to me having to work on vacation, rolling my eyes as if I’m really put out that I have to stay in the room to have this phone meeting with my editor. Secretly? People needing to speak with me? Even on vacation? This is exactly the kind of affirmation I’ve been waiting for all these years. This means that other people are taking me as seriously as I want to be taken. (You might say I’m a little slow on this whole publishing thing being real. But, honestly, sometimes I believe it and sometimes that belief completely fades away).
But here in South beach, I sit facing the ocean with my computer open to my edited manuscript, the phone to my right, a glass of mineral water to my left (in case my throat gets dry) and wait for my editor to call. And for two hours I discuss tiny details of passages I have labored over and my editor has read so carefully that it matters to her whether we need an “and” instead of a “comma.” The nerd in me thrilled to be analyzing how the “and” subtly changes the emphasis in the sentence.
The next day I bring my laptop to the pool area. That way I figure I don’t have to keep running up to the room to see if my editor sent me the book cover. Although once it starts raining, I realize that plan isn’t going to work and it gives me an excuse to check the e-mail in the room without distraction. And there it is… an e-mail with my cover! I’m so excited and ready to approve it and get back to my family and the guy in the pink thong.
Except that the cover is AWFUL. Hideous. I don’t even want to waste your time explaining how bad it was except to say that the colors were like an Easter Egg. Quickly and nervously, I e-mail my agent. He e-mails back. Agrees it’s hideous. We both e-mail my editor and say, No!
In between waiting for e-mails from my editor and agent, I go down to the pool and the beach (the sky is clear now) worrying about the Easter Egg cover (but also thinking, I’m in South Beach and other people are so invested in my work, in words I never imagined two years ago when I wrote them in my journal would ever be shared, that I have to go back and check to see if there are more covers for me to approve, that I may have to engage in even MORE discussion about why one does or doesn’t work… does it get any better than this??). So while my son splashes in the pool with some boys he befriended and my daughter listens to her iPod and reads The Stranger in French and works on her tan and my husband reads Skinny Bitch (at my urging) and sips cools drinks in the sun, I run back and forth between the pool and the room and the beach.
Finally, 4 more covers come through. All of them MUCH better than the first one and one of them really good. Not perfect but more than good enough for the catalog. I’m so excited and relieved.
By the time I’m done and get back down to the pool, it’s late afternoon. I find my husband sitting with the Other Mothers who are all complaining about their husbands on their BlackBerries.
I nod empathetically, remembering all the vacations when my husband was distracted with work and I was at the pool alone with the kids.
Then I hear my husband say, “My wife’s been in the room on the phone with her editor and agent for two days.”
And I realize this vacation I am he and he is me.
“Really?” the Other Mothers all say. “That’s interesting. Are you a writer?”
I glance over at my husband and wonder if he resents being left at the pool while I work.
“Yes,” he answers for me. “She’s written a great book!”
“What did I miss?” I ask, a tad anxiously.
“The topless Venezuelans,” one of the Other Mothers says.
My husband nods and grins. “But I finished Skinny Bitch,” he says.
“And the guy doing Jennifer Aniston arms was wearing a cowboy hat today,” my daughter walks up and scootches in next to me on the lounging chair to say.
“Are you done, Mom?” my son pops up from underwater and yells from the pool. “Will you throw the ball with me?”
“Yes,” I say. “I’m done.”
And it dawns on me that the power may be reshifting in my marriage (a bit) and I think I might be the one who will need to do the most adjusting.
Deb Gail
(click on the Gail to see new photos and new News and Events… tell me what you think!)
April 28th, 2008
| Posted by Gail | 2008 Debs, Book covers, Publishing, Travel, Vacation, writing
| 15 Comments
My first apartment wasn’t an apartment — it was a house. And not just any house but a house on Martha’s Vineyard the summer between my sophomore and junior years in college when I was a Derelict with a capital D. And, well, I had the house to match.
I lived in it with three other girls, which became two other girls once the third got a look at the way things were going to be for the next three months and had the good sense to get the hell out. And how were things going to be?
Well, when we weren’t having our nightly parties, we were cleaning up after our parties — which tended to involve getting so overwhelmed by the mess that we’d just rustle cigarette butts out of overfilled ashtrays and light them up. We had jobs, of course, and we even occasionally showed up for them. (I was fired from my first Vineyard job, at a yogurt shop, because the boss didn’t think I could swirl the yogurt correctly. The next one, at the snack bar at the Edgartown Yacht Club, was far more chill.)
But the house, which was a pretty ramshackle abode to begin with, never seemed to lose that eau de party or the thin layer of grime that our festive get-togethers left. And the elements of the house that had seemed utterly charming when we took the ferry out there one cold day in winter to sign the lease on our exciting summer house — the outdoor shower, for example — grew old very quickly. Yes, an outdoor shower is a glorious thing — if you’re on vacation in the Caribbean and need to wash off some sand. When it’s your only shower — and thus the one thing that stands between you and cleanliness — and it’s a ten foot walk from the house through trees and dirt that always seem to coat you in grime on your way back, it’s just a pain in the ass.
It was the kind of house that never saw a home-cooked meal prepared in it for 90 whole days, that had many former strangers sleeping it off on its couches and where, one night after a particularly wild party, a friend of ours passed out in a closet and then, temporarily believing the closet was the bathroom, relieved himself all over my roommate’s shoes.
Though I don’t live remotely like that anymore, I’d love to be able to travel back in time for just a day to see if it was really as fun as I thought it was at the time. Then I’d like to be delivered back to my lovely, clean, un-smokey apartment with its lack of drunken friends passed out in closets and its wonderful, perfect indoor shower.
April 2nd, 2007
| Posted by Anna | Anna David, Friends, Vacation, college, house guests, writing
| 10 Comments
If I hadn’t picked 12 containers of blackberries, I might not have ended up with the Dorothy Hamill-had-she-cut-her-locks-with-gardening-sheers haircut at the age of 13 (aka, the worst age to be when you suddenly find yourself possessing a disastrous haircut).
It seemed like a good enough idea at the time. I was staying with my friend Ramsay at her dad’s Napa vineyard for a week and after a few days of playing Go Go’s records, gorging on junk food and complaining about how thoroughly bored we were, we opted to take Ramsay’s dad up on his offer to pay us to pick blackberries for him.
A dollar a container was, I believe, the going rate — which was enough to get us out in the Napa sun and tossing as many blackberries as we could into the containers we were certain were going to make us rich. At some point rather early on, we must have realized that there was no point in working so hard to make money when we didn’t have anything we wanted the money for. Thus, we reasoned — and here’s where the thinking is fuzzy because I don’t recall whose mind this idea sprung from — why not attempt to make $24, which would net us each enough to get radical haircuts at the local Supercuts?
We picked until our fingers were bloody, traded the berries in for cold, hard cash and headed into town for our makeovers. Why I chose a Napa Supercuts to be the recipient of the long locks I’d had since I was five is anyone’s guess. As far as I know, blackberry juice stained onto fingers doesn’t tamper with your mind. Ramsay, too, went a radical route, so it’s safe to say that we were both under the same deluded spell.
Honestly, I really thought that both Ramsay and I looked great. We passed a mirror back and forth, complimented each other, and took pictures to pass the time before returning home to show our respective mothers our new looks. And while I can’t remember what Ramsay’s mom’s reaction was, I remember that my mom cried. Cried. And she’s not prone to drama. I think I argued that I thought I looked good, all through her emergency call to a hair salon and trip down there — where she begged the stylist to fix it.
So what did I learn from my hairy adolescent adventure? Well, for one, Napa may be the place for a good merlot but is not where radical hair decisions should be made.
And there are a lot easier ways to make a buck than picking blackberries.
February 12th, 2007
| Posted by Anna | Anna David, California, Family, Life, Mothers, Vacation, childhood, writing
| 6 Comments
My name is Anna and I am an exercise addict. In terms of addictions, it could be worse – I should know, because I have all of them. (I have what they call an addictive personality.) With exercise, however, I’m not planning to get into recovery. See, considering the fact that I’m also addicted to chocolate (an obsession I seem to share with my fellow Deb Mia), my need to don some type of tights and a workout bra and burn those chocolate calories off is a good thing.
Everyone in my family is like this. My dad goes to the gym every day, my mom runs on her home treadmill every other, and my brother literally cannot function unless he’s run a good, say, 20 miles in the past 12 hours. I remember an old boyfriend joking, when I was going home for Thanksgiving, “What do you guys do that night, anyway? Each have a glass of water and then go, ‘All right, that’s it, now let’s hit the gym’?” (Actually, my family tends to work out before the meal, pig out and then work out twice as hard the next day — seriously.)
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October 21st, 2006
| Posted by Anna | Boyfriend, California, Chocolate, Family, Vacation, food, writing
| 3 Comments
Travelers fall into two different categories:
a) Planners
b) Anti-planners
My Dad is a planner. Family vacations were undertaken with the same level of care as the Allied Invasion, although it’s an unfair comparison as General Patton had far more support staff. My Dad was stuck with my mom and me.
During family vacations we woke with the sun, there was a lot to see. If my mom or I complained my dad would ask with disbelief, “if you wanted to lay about in bed all day doing nothing why did we bother to go on vacation?” We would sprint from sight to sight and requests for breaks to eat, drink, or go the bathroom were seen as signs of weakness and failure to be a team player. There were whole worlds to be explored and we had only 14 days, thirteen nights.
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September 29th, 2006
| Posted by Eileen | Family, Friends, Life, Travel, Vacation
| 12 Comments
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