Travel

1871FrontWho says you can’t go home again? I just did and am here to testify that though it was a bit strange, it was more than wonderful to return to the place I lived in 41 years ago. Planning my recent trip back east where I would be staying with family and two of my oldest and dearest girlfriends, I decided to start off my trip by staying in a hotel for a few nights. After checking the rates in our two favorite New York hotels, The Regency and The Surrey and catching my breath I decided to look at a few other options.

My husband and I have become huge fans of VRBO and through it we’ve rented great vacation houses in Hawaii, London and San Francisco to name a few. The house in Kauai we rented several summers ago was spectacular. Seriously we lucked out big time. But getting back to NYC, I combed the VRBO listings and didn’t find anyplace I felt like staying in. Those that looked good were either too big or in neighborhoods I didn’t know, or just looked like what it was: someone else’s nice apt but not mine! Then I remembered that a friend had once mentioned that she’d stayed in a lovely Bed and Breakfast in NYC. What the heck, with nothing to lose, and possibly hundreds to save, I googled B and B’s in Manhattan. Quell Surprise! Welcome to a whole new way to go! I had plenty of options to scroll through and scroll I did!

With renewed enthusiasm, scrolling, smiling, practically drooling, something caught my eye. Wait! I know that room! I know those windows! Backing up for a closer inspection, my enthusiasm turned into awe. I stopped and enlarged the picture of the room. That was my apartment! Decades ago, four to be exact! I read the name of The B and B, the 1871 House. The name confused me, but knowing those windows, I clicked onto the 1871 website.

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taco.jpg After growing up in Western Massachusetts, it didn’t take me long to become spoiled living in Los Angeles. Not only do we constantly have fresh produce from around the world, but delicacies from every nation are well-represented.  Mexican food didn’t reach my hometown until I was in college and even then it was either Chi-Chi’s or Taco Bell, neither of which is very authentic or culinary genius. Regardless of quality, the food was something completely new and I was immediately hooked on guacamole, chips, salsa and greasy crispy tacos. Once I landed here – and got a taste of the real thing – there was no stopping my cravings for all things “South of the Border.“ L.A. is the crossroads of the world when it comes to food and I never realized how lucky I was to live here until I went to Europe for a month. 

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leopold-schmidt.jpgsteve_zaillian.jpg Olympia is a charming little city in the Pacific Northwest, set down on rolling hills surrounded by forests of Douglas-fir, bigleaf maple and red cedar – a pretty, speckled egg resting in a nest of twigs.

This is the old part – the far end of the Oregon Trail, settled on Native American land by Europeans in the 1850’s – where Leopold Schmidt founded the Olympia Brewing Company in nearby Tumwater Falls and sold his beer, if you recall, with the slogan, "it’s the water," which I’m surprised none of the hundreds of water bottlers has adopted now that Leopold’s beer business has folded.

olympia-brewing-co.jpg This is Downtown Olympia, with its century-old buildings, its perfectly-proportioned Capitol, its tree-lined streets on which people drive politely and you can always find a place to park – often without a meter – near the still-family-run bookstore or café or bike shop you want to go to.

But that’s not where I wanted to go, or rather needed to go, to help my son move into an unfurnished apartment.  We needed to head over to the other part of Olympia and it is this part – which I imagine you’d find outside most other American towns of its size – that I’m still trying to figure out as the plane banks over Puget Sound taking me home.

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greetingsst_az2.jpgWe saved a bundle by getting married in March and it allowed our relatives to relieve their East Coast cabin fever, but it makes celebrating our anniversary a bit of a problem. Since we live in Los Angeles, having left our wintry childhood homes decades ago, our travel options are quite slim, especially since we don't usually have the time or inclination to schlep to Hawaii or Florida for the same weather. Living next door to Arizona and being baseball freaks has recently helped solve this vacation dilemma. 

The Phoenix/Scottsdale area is home to the Cactus League, the Spring Training grounds of our beloved Chicago Cubs and, since 2011, our hometown Dodgers. So, for the past few years, instead of scouring the Internet for an interesting place in Southern California to while away a weekend, we’ve just jumped in our car and headed East. The drive is brutally dull and longer than you'd imagine considering flying to Phoenix only takes an hour, but our excitement and the MLB channel on XM kept our spirits up.

The great thing about attending games during Spring Training is the intimacy...and for most fans coming in from colder parts of the country, the weather. 82 and sunny is pretty much par for the course. You can pick out the out-of-towners quite easily by their sunburns. No local would be caught dead without a hat and sunscreen...or a shirt. Most of the facilities only hold around 10,000 fans, so there’s really no bad seat in the house.

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four-seasons-resort-maui.jpgLots 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.   

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