The Jolt of the City

I am in need of a Spring Break. So many people these days are getting away to the beach. I, however, am yearning for the "jolt" of a big city.

Here's the haiku I posted the other day on my haiku blog, Haiku By Two:

I need Manhattan,
Bangkok, Buenos Aires, Rome,
out of these suburbs.

Photo - Bangkok

Che Spotted in JFK

A trip is not a trip unless there is a Che-spotting.

That's my rule anyway.

On this most recent trip to New York to visit friends, I was so caught up in having quality bonding time with my long-time buddies that I nearly forgot all about my ongoing Che-spotting mission.

But no fear! This time, Che came to me.

As I rose to board my plane home in a busy JFK, a college-aged man pushed into line before me carrying "the" whopping 800-page Che Guevara biography.

I recognized the cover right away as the book sat on my bookshelf for many years. I bought it, determined to read the whole thing cover to cover, but the sheer size of the volume just overwhelmed. I never got more than 20 pages in and eventually I sold it to a used book store.


I would never have pegged the book's holder for a Che fanatic. Then again, most people wouldn't peg me as Che obsessed either.

I hope this ambitious reader makes it further through the book than I did!

Hot in the City

It's sooooooo hot here in New York! We've been dodging the heat (or trying to) for the past few days and today, as the temperature soared into the high 90s, Michelle and I ventured into Manhattan.

Were we crazy?

Maybe. The heat definitely felt oppressive as we walked the streets surrounded by towering concrete, but we had to come into the city; I needed to get back to JFK so that I could fly home.

Yet we are resourceful girls. Our plan to beat the heat was to while away some time in a nail salon getting manicures and then to waste away at Cafe Frida drinking Sangria.

Minne Soda

Hey Kelly.

Yeah?

What's your favorite kind of soda?

Fanta. What's yours?

Minne Soda.

And so goes the joke.

Over and over again.

It's pretty clever, really. Especially when you learn that the play on words is attributed to a four year-old.

The joke would never fly with a four year-old in Minnesota, a place where "soda" is faithfully called "pop." But I had to hand it to this East Coast kid. His Minne Soda joke was smart.

The four year-old in question is the son of my dear friend Michelle, who I've been staying with for a few days in her suburban New York home. For weeks she had been telling her son that I was coming to visit all the way from Minnesota. Unacquainted with U.S. geography, he heard something entirely different.

On Travel Friends and Travel

So I've made it to New York.

Not the city. The state. I'm here for five or so days, somewhere in suburbia.

It used to be that I traveled to the city once a year (sometimes twice) to hang with my good friends, travel buds, gals I picked up on the road who called Brooklyn and Manhattan home.

Now though, both are married, both are moms and both have left the urban congestion behind for the equally-maddening suburban kind.

It's a strange and glorious thing to visit travel buds on their home turf. It's perhaps even more of a strange and glorious thing to go into their now-established homes and eat meals with their husbands and kids.

Here are these women, my friends that I met while we were all off doing wild, adventurous things, and now they are (and I am too I suppose) settled and busy being adults, as opposed to busy becoming adults, which was what we were doing at the time of our meetings.

I was busy becoming an adult when I met Alison in Argentina.

And then Alison and I met Michelle in Peru.

And then Michelle and I traveled together through Guatemala.


And so it was that a series of Latin American jaunts brought these women, women I truly consider two of my soul mates, into my life.

What is it about people that you meet on the road? Since becoming a traveler, I've always marveled at how quickly bonds are formed on the move.

On this trip, I happened to ask Michelle what she thought it was that brought random travelers together.

"Vulnerability," she said. "It makes you hang on to people you don't know."

Lucky for me, I've been able to hang onto these friends longer than the trips on which I met them. It's been 10 (gulp) years now since I met them both.

Photos:

2008 - Celebrating our 10 year-reunion with calorie-packed, gourmet cookies in suburban New York.

1998 - Triumphant and tired after hiking four days to reach Machu Picchu. We really could have used those cookies way back then.