Travel

In our effort to downsize but continue to have fun, we scrambled together all our frequent flyer miles and managed to put together two return flights to London and Italy. Then, by making a small investment on a home exchange site, we found a young woman in Prato (twenty minutes from Florence), willing to do a non-simultaneous exchange with our desert house in Joshua Tree.

Our first stop was London, where a kind friend loaned us her house. Although I grew up in London I have not lived there in over 30 years. The minute I walked off the plane, I was surprised by the intense 80-degree heat, a byproduct of global warming, and something I had never encountered in my childhood, where you were lucky if it reached the mid 70’s in the summer.  After struggling with the new monetary denominations and a new subway system, I began to feel like a stranger in my hometown,

Yet, one area that has vastly improved since I lived in London is the food. But like everything else, it is very expensive. Fortunately, another ex-Brit friend had recently visited London and her sage advice was that bargains could be had at posh restaurants if you went at lunch, rather than dinner.  Following her recommendation, backed up by “Time out”– still the best magazine to tell you what is going on in London – I made reservations at Gauthier, a French restaurant in Soho.  

Above the title of our local paper, the VINEYARD GAZETTE, is the pithy quote (they always have a pithy quote), “With rod and tackle box, I’m slogging through soft sand, A red sun going down in the surf, Swag-belly clouds drifting in,” authored by Peter Makuck. Just below the Gazette title is its mission statement: “Devoted to the interest of the six towns on the Island of Martha’s Vineyard.”

The world simply does not intrude on the Vineyard!

This week the above the crease headline reads, “Patricia Neal – Sparkling Stories And Sunflowers To Say Goodbye.” (We will all miss that dame!) Near it is the ‘shocking’ story of a Trustee who nearly – nearly! – Ran over a nest of LEAST TERN CHICKS on the barrier beach, forcing his resignation. (If only our federal government could function with this kind of immediate civic responsibility!)

The Vineyard Gazette is as good an introduction to Martha’s Vineyard as anything I know. Even its dimensions – larger than most newspapers – forces one to sit back (preferably in a rocking chair), open the paper and read... not scan, but read! We people on this Island actually still read, support bookstores, treat authors most gently, and buy local painters. In other words, we love this Island and the eccentric characters that reside here. And, eccentric we all are!

Brian and Maria Gabriella are Americans who live in Umbria part of the year. They’re opera singers and run a travel business on the side, which affords them some great travel perks as they check out possible adventures for their clients. They recently got back from a trip to Sicily and were regaling us with stories.

“I ate pasta with eggplant and tomatoes every day for two weeks,” said Brian. “Sometimes twice a day. “If I never see another bowl of pasta with eggplant and tomatoes, that’ll be just fine.”

All I could think of was that I wanted a big bowl of pasta with eggplant and tomatoes. He got me going.

And then the universe – as it will do sometimes if you’re lucky and aware – dropped a remarkable coincidence in my lap. The next day I was out shopping for, you guessed it, eggplant and tomatoes, and there was a truck parked in our little piazza manned by three guys from Naples. The back of the truck was filled with gorgeous produce, fresh from the south – not only the veg I needed for my pasta, but crates of red and yellow peppers, nectarines and strawberries so fresh that if you didn’t eat them within ten minutes, they’d be over.

“We’re sliding smack dab into the inevitably expensive tourist trap,” you say as the taxi driver curses and swerves through the gridlocked traffic of Ipanema Beach’s main drag Avenida Vieira Souto (with its famously geometric-patterned sidewalks) and onto the narrow traffic-choked streets of the city.

Your destination was suggested by our hotel’s concierge whom you had asked for a suggestion for authentic Brazilian food. You were hoping for a cozy hole-in-the-wall filled with smoke, grumpy locals and slow waiters.

The restaurant, Porcão – which you immediately translated to Poor Cow – was just the opposite of that. Poor Cow was all you feared, expensive and a tourist trap (adding to the blah decor was a wall-size TV playing a silent futbol match), exactly like those places that have popped up all over major U.S. cities where frantic waiters bring huge stumps of grilled meat to your table, where they slice off chunks in perpetuity until you feel as if you’ve ingested a small cow. But you were hungry and jet lagged and needed to get out of the hotel or you would have gone right to sleep only to wake up in the middle of the night, hungry and jet lagged. You felt like a bad tourist, but the outing served its purpose and besides, you have something special to look forward the next day – Cook In Rio – a one-day cooking class at some lady’s house in Copacabana that you had found online. An authentic Brazilian experience was promised and this time you are not disappointed.