Tag Archives: Florida

No sense of direction, but I’d be lost without Mom

13 May

Stratford-upon-Avon, Ontario, Canada

If there’s a gene that prevents map reading, then I inherited mine from mom. Want to know what direction to go? Just ask either of us and then head away from our pointing fingers.

Going unfamiliar places is a challenge for my mom, but it doesn’t hold her back. When I was small, she’d brave the fear head-on by dressing Emily and me in pinafores, patent leather shoes and hair bows for a lunch date with dad. After a final check-in with my dad before leaving the house, the yellow cord of the kitchen phone twisted and swirled as she reviewed the detailed written instructions and map, we’d pile into the Mercury and point its big yellow hood south. As we approached downtown Cincinnati, we were hushed into silence as she concentrated on the exit signs in rapid succession and complicated lane markings. For a farm girl, the sights of one-way streets, pedestrian crossings and parallel parking made Cincinnati look like New York City.

In reality, we lived less than 15 minutes from the heart of downtown. With my dad behind the wheel, we frequently entered the city to visit museums and attend sporting events, concerts and festivals. The geography of Cincinnati made these trips even easier – drive on I-71 until you hit the skyscrapers. If you go over the Ohio River, you’ve gone too far. Downtown’s small grid of east-west numbered streets makes it one of the U.S.’s most accessible cities.

Despite how easy it should have been, the fear was real for mom each time she made a solo trip. But thanks to her bravery, we always arrived safely for our Skyline lunch, even if we missed a turn and had to circle the block.

I can imagine her relief when we would spot dad in a sea of downtown workers on the corner of 4th and Main Streets, flagging down the car with one hand while holding his tie down in the breeze with the other. As soon as my dad jumped into the driver’s seat and my mom slid to the passenger side of the bench, he assumed parking duties and Emily and I could talk again.

As I got older, trips with mom continued, but the places started getting more exotic: spring break in the Bahamas and Florida; Mom’s weekends in Athens, Ohio; girls’ weekends at the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford-upon-Avon, Ontario; Washington, D.C. and even New York City. She braved all these places to be with me and although we always spend part of the trip a little bit lost, it’s also part of the fun.

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Eating bugs isn’t the only thing to do in Florida

9 Feb

Florida Everglades, near Key Largo

Nick is my favorite traveling companion. I often say that we’re at our best when we’re traveling together. We each have our roles, we execute them, and the fun ensues.

However, achieving this state of perfect trip harmony required that we first reach a philosophical agreement on the definition of a “good trip.”

Our first vacation together was to the Florida Keys. In the summer. Because when you’re a poor Capitol Hill staffer dating an even poorer med student, you search for the deals. But it didn’t matter to us that it was off-off-season. All that mattered was that we were escaping Washington, D.C. and going on a beach vacation.

We escaped all right, and we arrived in the hottest land of  hotness and stickiness. Our comfort levels were further deteriorated by the bugs.

Insects should be the state symbol for Florida. The tiny ones swarm together and create a strike force, the massive ones travel solo and are the assassins, liable to land on your head or crawl into a shoe when you least expect it.  When I think of Florida, I have the urge to clear a bug from my throat. It’s impossible to conjure a memory of anything happening in Florida that doesn’t also include the presence of giant, prehistoric-looking bugs. “Hey remember that time in Disney when that winged creature landed on your shoulder and you lost your balance?” or “….Just when I reached Tampa, the sky darkened and I couldn’t see three feet in front of me – the bugs had blocked the sun.”

We didn’t think about the bugs before the trip, nor did we discuss our itinerary. Perhaps we were too wrapped up in the excitement of leaving D.C. and going on a beach vacation.

I waited until our vacation officially started to bring up the subject of our agenda for the next few days. Driving down the A1A with the top down and splattered bugs coating  the windshield in a thick layer of death, I suggested a few sites, activities and sidetrips we could take. Innocently, I didn’t expect disagreement.

Turns out, the sleep deprived overachiever next to me had our itinerary planned out down to the minute.  Our agenda, he revealed, was: sleeping in, snoozing on the beach, napping by the pool and going to bed early.

My jaw dropped. A bug flew in.

It was a critical moment. After all, this was our first trip together. We’d be setting a precedent for all future trips. Or worse, if we couldn’t come to an agreement, this could be our last trip together.

I spit out the bug, took a deep breath, and made my case. Here’s the thing about vacations, I explained, we need to have a few talking points to field the 1000 “how was your trip?” questions. Just a few sentences that cover what we did and  your general impressions of the place. What else we did between the talking points — all the napping, sleeping, snoozing – could be skipped in the after action report.

“It was hot and buggy and we slept a lot,” were not the talking points I had in mind.

My amazing powers of persuasion worked.

We rode through the Everglades on an air boat, saw the local wildlife, visited a few different beaches and had one of our most memorable meals ever at Pierre’s in Islamorada. We also napped, sweated through three sets of clothes a day and killed lots of bug, but those weren’t the talking points we shared.

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