It's no secret that my best friend, Missy and I love to travel. We met 25 years ago in the parking lot of a Winn Dixie grocery store in Valdosta, Georgia. I was in college there and she was home on Spring Break from Pepperdine in Malibu, CA. I thought she was the prettiest girl I had ever seen and never imagined that we'd grow up together and travel the world.
She put a damper on that for a few years when she got married and had 3 boys back to back. But I think we've pretty much made up for that in the last 6 months as we have been to Italy, Tuscany, Rome, the island of Capri, Spain, the South of France, Nice and Monaco. Tunisia is in Northern Africa. I hated it, she loved it. We spent a week in Paris in December, with 5 of our best girlfriends in a rented apartment on the Seine.
As many places as Missy and I have traveled to, we both have such a huge love for Ireland. Come Spring and Fall, we both feel a need to go there, to have some fish and chips and a pint of Guinness. Her middle child was doing his class project on Ireland and my 18 year old nephew, his Grandma's favorite child (my only nephew) is about to graduate from high school.
I talked my nephew into telling his grandma that he wanted nothing more than a trip to Ireland with his favorite aunt and Missy talked her son into telling his Dad that it would mean the world to him to go with his mom and me (his Godmother) to Ireland to complete his school project.
New Year's eve has got to be the most over-rated holiday of the year. I'm
all about celebrating any holiday, even the ones I have never heard of
but I always dread New Year's eve. Something about being forced to stay
up late, wearing a sparkly, tacky hat and tooting a horn, trying to be
cheerful and chatty when I am actually dog tired from the Christmas
holidays. Otherwise the option is to stay home and feel depressed that
everyone else is out having a good time except for me.
Last week, when Saveur Magazine arrived, I immediately started reading the many articles on "greatest meals ever" with great curiosity, all the while thinking what would be my greatest meal? A meal of a life time. What makes a great meal different from all the other wonderful meals that you have eaten?
Can we talk about how strange a yoga class in London is? Stretch out
your kidneys, she kept saying. Elongate your kidneys. Her British
accent easing me from one pose to another…but…kidneys? Really? I
don’t even know where my kidneys are. Honestly, I know they’re
somewhere in my torso region but to the point where I could isolate
them into a stretch. It was really strange.
We were going to take a cab to Damascus for dinner, but we couldn’t get
our visas, so we headed south. I was in Jordan, the Middle Eastern
Sundance Lab had ended. The aspiring filmmakers and their mentors were
dispersing back home to Cairo, Beruit, Ramallah and Casablanca.