psssssssst...he's gone!...
(sound of rapid, clicking footsteps)
Hello, dear friends of Tvindy. This would be Bakerina, the same Bakerina responsible for the lemon curd below (and Tvindy, when you get this, you're welcome, sugar), here to help keep the place tidy while our host heads back to school.
As those of us who hang around here know well, Tvindy is spending the next few days driving from Muncie, Indiana to Eugene, Oregon, with some stops along the way for rest and photography, to say nothing of a nice visit in Wyoming (not Montana!) with our lovely mutual friend Snowball. It is probably a sign of how long it's been since I've done any significant road travel, but I must admit that this road trip of his sounds like heaven in a teacup. It is almost a cliche -- no, scratch the "almost" -- but nonetheless I live it every day: I live in a densely populated area, I work in a cubicle in an office; every day I come to work and sit in a cube, and, Walter-Mitty-like, Sam-Lowry-like, I dream of escape, even just for a day. The fact that it won't happen this year -- I used up all my vacation time on One Really Big Adventure and thus have nothing left for a day off here and there -- probably just feeds the wanderlust.
I am a mad fool for any kind of traveling, always have been. When I can't go anywhere myself, I read about people who can, and have, from Laurence Sterne to Jennifer Brennan to Eric Newby to Bruce Chatwin to Anthony Bourdain. I know that there has been a planing off of our regional differences; our landscapes are dotted with chains and centralized businesses, one place in America looking very much like another place 1,800 miles away; still, I love the idea that we can move ourselves across big distances and at least have the chance to see something 1,800 miles away from home that we would never see at home. I am still giddy from my spur-of-the-moment Labor Day trip to Colorado, when Snowball drove me through Rocky Mountain National Park. As luck would have it, we were treated to rain and fog over much of the weekend, and Snow found herself repeatedly assuring me, "We really do have mountains out here!" Nevertheless, even with reduced visibility, I was entranced. I loved the snow-capped peaks; I loved the foothills covered with evergreens; I loved the early migration of elk into the resort town where Snowball grew up; and most of all, I loved the canyons and narrows, and the tiny little towns settled in them. I rode through winding paths in Snowball's little blue convertible, the top down, stark ragged rock less than 30 feet from us, and I'd never thought I'd seen anything so dazzling.
Of course, New Yorkers are saps for the wonders of nature, which is why we're such an easy butt of jokes for the locals of the places unfortunate enough to capture our teeming, pain-in-the-ass vacationing masses. I spent most of my wonder years in the Poconos, in northeastern Pennsylvania, where we had a fresh influx of exhausted city folk every season: trout fishers in the spring, white water rafters and families with lakefront vacation homes in the summer, leaf peepers in the fall, would-be skiers and snowmobilers in the winter. To this day, it still amuses me when I hear people say of New York, "It's a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there," because that describes, to a T, my feelings about the Poconos. It's beautiful countryside, the skiing is great, the rafting is great, but eventually, when these things begin to pall, there is really very little else to do. And heaven forbid that you buy a lift ticket for one of the ski resorts, only to discover that the area gets an ice storm about once every six minutes from December through April, and you can't even drive to the mountain. I couldn't get out of town fast enough after graduation.
I try to remember my younger homebound self now that I am a sheep in the big city, but I'll admit it: I'm as big a sap for a new place, a wide-open pretty space, as those leaf peepers at which I used to poke such fun in childhood. A long weekend in Vermont, a day trip to Connecticut, a drive to Lancaster County with my mom to buy chocolate at the Wilbur factory in Lititz; it's all a shot in the arm. My One Really Big Adventure vacation, in northwest Arkansas, deposited me in a part of the state with so much natural beauty that I used to walk around for hours, wondering to myself what good deed I had done to be allowed to visit such a breathtaking place. There are more of these places out there, places both famous for their local charm and beauty and not-so-famous, desolate-sounding places loaded with their own offbeat charm. Most of them are accessible by airports of varying size, but there is something making the trip by car, really feeling that distance you travel, that makes me itch to go buy some sturdy little machine built for long drives, and to fill it with bags of snacks and music for the road. On my first trip to England I took a bus from Gatwick airport to my friends' house in Plymouth, Devon, a four-hour ride, and I wished I were driving so that I could pull off the motorway at all the exits that looked interesting to me. (Because its name was so frequently dropped in Monty Python sketches, I feel that it is imperative that I visit Dorking before I die.) If I had my way, I'd take that kind of trip now. I'd head west, light out for the territories, just to see what I could see, go meet Tvindy and Snowball for coffee, and then head to Thermopolis, Wyoming, just because I understand they have a hot spring, and just because I like the way Thermopolis sounds.
