Travel

I like to think I have a decent grasp on the 7 deadly sins. I’m not overly vain, anger isn’t an issue for me, and sloth & laziness have never fit into my neurotically busy life. But when we headed to La Cabrera in Buenos Aires for dinner last night, that one little tiny vice-o-mine came crashing into full view.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Gluttony.

Yea yea yea, I know it’s a sin. But it was my birthday and I’ll find any excuse to indulge and overdo it on every possible level. And last night I think we all exceeded our goals.

Buenos Aires is packed with parillas, the traditional Argentine meal of grilled beef that makes the Texas barbecues I grew up with pale in comparison. It’s not my goal to incite a riot here, but you can’t deny the love and passion the porteños have when it comes to their beef. I figured there could be no better way to celebrate than with wine, beef, and good friends.

If you ford a river with the crowd, the crocodile cannot eat you.
         –Malagasy proverb

My husband, Bill Rollnick, and I were part of an American Red Cross team traveling to Madagascar to help implement the global Measles and Malaria Preventive Initiative. In October, our team was part of a joint partnership led by the American Red Cross, the United Nations Foundation, UNICEF, CDC, WHO and the Malagasy government in which millions of Malagasy children, ages 9 months to 5 years, received measles vaccine, Vitamin A, de-worming medicine and insecticide-treated mosquito nets.

Living in a city with 6,000+ restaurants, why would you ever drive 150 miles to eat in a city with a population of 1,500? For me, it’s a kind of a Hillary Clinton type thing. She was right, it does take a village to raise a child. Unfortunately for my wife and I, parents of a 16 month old boy who believes soil is a basic food group, we left the village back in our home state of Michigan when we moved to Chicago. So when we need a break from the exhaustive process of keeping our son’s mouth free of dirt and other things you find on the average floor, we gotta go to the village.

It turns out Fennville, a one Subway franchise town surrounded by farmland and located two hours from Chicago and about six miles from the nearest freeway, is the perfect halfway point between Lansing, home of my in-laws, and our West Loop loft. Luckily for us, it’s also home to one of Michigan’s best restaurants, the Journeyman, our drop off point for junior’s sleepovers, aka parental sanity breaks, with the grandparents.

The Journeyman is a culinary dream, a destination so incongruous with its location you’re not sure it really exists.

Lots of winters, I’ve been lucky enough to join in the migration unique to a certain subspecies of Los Angeles native where flocks of family units pick up and move five hours by oversold mechanized bird west to an abbreviated hyphen of sand in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.  But I don’t mean to sound dispassionate or cynical or something, because the nagging concerns of existential meaning¹ that the previous sentence  might appear to have summoned kind of just slink away when that first warm blanket of air wraps you up in the middle of December, when the roars of leaf-blowers and the 101 have been traded for the soft lapping of the sea, when you first pull up to the shining white sprawl of a resort where everything from the photocopied New York Times crossword puzzles waiting at breakfast to the pool waterslide helps aid in the dissolution of whatever negative thoughts might be careening around between your ears. 

Never mind that the concept of vacation as escape is turned into this sort of farce due to the feeling that all inhabitants of Southern California who travel to Hawaii during the holidays end up staying at one of three hotels within half a mile of each other on the western shore of Maui and hyper-image-conscious businesspeople/kids/vague acquaintances bump into their peers all week long, except that all the judging here goes on while everybody is half-naked.  Never mind all of that; it’s totally possible to ignore the Dark Side of this scene and just chill out.