This is Vinny. A noble steed with an independent streak, Vinny was one of the highlights of my weekend at Mt. Washington, New Hampshire. Knox and I took it easy this year: we swam a little and socialized a lot, I learned to ride horses and he learned to fly fish. And we danced. To Madonna.
It was fun.
Now, alas, Knox is traveling back to Seattle and I am focusing on work, biking, and reading.
The Boston Globe talks about vacationing in Newfoundland. Hah! Been there, done that!
Living life differently than the expectations you’ve slowly settled down into over the years sometimes makes the best sense, but often feels like swimming against the current. If that’s where life takes you and what you are called to do, though, then there’s no helping it: you just hunker down and do it. What a pleasant surprise it is, then, to find that you are not alone, that there are others who are making similar unobtrusive choices and have paved the way before you. Many an obscure bend in the road turns out to be well traveled: coming out, bike commuting, …. or a dual-residence relationship.
Knox and I are currently doing the bi-coastal thing. He’s working mostly in Seattle at the moment, and I am in Boston. We can each advance our careers and enjoy the non-couple parts of our lives, and we get to travel between two fascinating cities (or meet somewhere in between). At the same time, we juggle how best to optimize our time together: holidays, vacations, and the minutiae of everyday life.
It turns out that we are certainly not alone in these choices. The New York Times alone had two articles on the topic this week: one on “living alone together” and one on couples who maintain two regular homes because of work. The local boookstore carries The Long-Distance Relationship Guide. And our friend Pam has a trans-Atlantic marriage that has her summering in Seattle and wintering in Austria.
So far, we’re handling things well and the experience is proving instructive. Knox is getting ready to leave for Seattle in a few days, and I am looking forward to visiting him there in early June. He’s met my friends here and explored the area; now it will be my turn to get to know his friends better and get acquainted with the much-vaunted Pacific Northwest.
Right now, though, we’re enjoying a lazy morning reading the paper at a local cafe before walking, biking, and dining in one of our cities.
The Desert Tour was everything Knox and I could have hoped for, and
more. After our little hotel fiasco-cum-windfall, we spent the first
few days
sightseeing
around San Diego on foot and running last-minute errands to get our
bikes ready for the trip. We walked along the
waterfront,
visited the
arboretum
in Balboa Park, and walked in
Coronado. San
Diego struck me as a blandly pleasant city: the streets were wide and
clean
and everything seemed nice
enough,
but the parts where we were seemed to lack a certain vitality, a
certain je ne sais quoi, during the day.
To be sure, at night the
Gaslamp District came
alive
with partyiers and revelers, all the more so because it was
St. Patrick’s Day.
The biking part of our trip began on a Sunday: we took the street car to the neighboring town of El Cajon to avoid the hassles of city traffic. From there, we immediately began a steep, arduous climb, after only fifteen miles of which we decided to call it a night at the town of Alpine. We were off to an inauspicious start: we had a heavy rain shower shortly after we began, and had to buy giant Ziplock bags to protect our tent and sleeping bags, as we had purposefully not packed wet-weather gear; this was Southern California, after all! The reality was that, in spite of our visions of cavorting in Souther California shirtless, the area was in the middle of a cold spell the likes of which had not been seen since 1991. In fact, on the second night of our actual biking, as we were crossing the mountains through Cuyamaca Rancho State Park, we were surrounded by snow. The park and its campgrounds were closed, but the volunteers manning the welcome center made a few phone calls and obtained authorization to open up a cabin for us, and near the bathrooms at that. Yep, we were the only ones there, in a little hut with a wood-burning stove (which we kept lit throughout the night). It was all very Brokeback, what with the isolation, the camping, and Knox’s neo-cowboy hat.
The morning held even more surprises for us: a fresh inch or two of snow covering our path out of the park, and sleet and sludge on the main road. We hitched a ride to the town of Julian, locally famous for its pies, with some San Diego chiropractors in the area for the first time. It was all downhill from there (literally, certainly not figuratively!). A hailstorm accompanied us on our departure from Julian, and my fingers were seared by the cold that rendered my biking gloves thin wet rags. As we lost elevation, however, the weather turned gradually warmer and drier, and we were amazed at how quickly our surroundings changed into spectacular mountainous desert views. During one of our stops, in fact, a fellow bike tourer with four Ortliebs to my two passed us with a fleeting greeting.
Our stop that day was Agua Caliente state park, a natural hot spring in the desert. We soaked in both the indoor and outdoor pools with fellow vacationers, most of them elderly folks, until closing time (5pm most weekdays, unfortunately). We pitched our tent in the sand among the not-so-shy cotton-tail rabbits and got an amazing view of the mottled sky after the sun fell.
After an equally spectacular
sunrise,
we got on our bikes and pedaled on to the Yuma
Desert. We
passed through Plaster
City,
a giant drywall manufacturing plant, and a multitude of plowed
fields
made possible by the
wonders
(hah!)
of
irrigation. Though
we were considering biking up to the Salton
Sea, we decided to spend the
night in El Centro, where
we stuffed ourselves with Mexican food and enjoyed the motel hot tub.
The last and longest cycling day found us on an the worst roads of all: cracked, abandoned pavement running parallel to the highway. Though we were tempted to spend some time at an alluring hot spring oasis by the side of Highway 8, we pedaled on. What few irrigated fields there were had been abandoned, and before long we came to the sand dunes that could easily be the set of any Saharan (or Star Wars!) epic– save perhaps for the helicopters that seemed to hover near us every so often, probably an immigration patrol trying to convince itself that latex-clad bikers were probably not undocumented foreign nationals. In the midst of this isolation, no less, my bike broke down: the vibration from riding the warped pavement had sheared off one of the screws holding up one of my front racks, and right as I fixed that, my front tire went flat (no visible puncture, perhaps it there was something loose in the bent valve). We persevered, and at 5:14, after 194 miles of biking, we crossed the [not-so-mighty] Colorado River into Yuma, Arizona.
Knox’s parents were waiting for us on the Arizona side of the bridge. After introductions (and an all-too-public change of clothes) we had dinner and headed back to the Imperial National Wildlife Refuge, where they are stationed. We were able to stay in our own guest trailer, and were treated to good home cooking and friendly ribbing during our stay. We went on several hikes at the refuge and in the Kofa Refuge, during which we were able to see barrel, saguaro, prickly pear, and agave cacti, as well as ocotillos, palo verdes, wild honeycombs, lizards, bats (and bat caves), and endangered frogs. The highlight, though, has to have been the rattlesnake that Knox and I stepped over one night and which was only pointed out to us by Knox’s nephew (who joined us with his mother toward the end of our stay).
Though I enjoyed meeting Knox’s family and we all got along really well (even Miss Whitney, the slightly spastic new family dog which one night ransacked the home while we were away), it was all too soon time to part. After a brief visit to the Yuma Crossing museum, we boarded a bus back to San Diego. We got a brief glimpse of Calexico and got carded by immigration authorities. As we suspected, there were a lot of border crossings and border patrols during our whole trip, in part because of geography and in part because of the political events in Washington.
We stayed just one night at the Hotel Solamar, enjoying a fancy dinner and all the accoutrements of luxury, before departing on our respective flights– Knox to Seattle, me to Boston. The time has just flown by, but we consider ourselves pretty lucky to have the type of life where we can take such crazy, wild vacations– and we’re already thinking about the next one.
In a few hours, I will be flying from Boston to San Diego, where Knox will join me from his current work stint in Seattle.
Our ultimate goal: Yuma, AZ, by way of Joshua Tree National Park.
Yes, we’re taking our bikes. Yes, we’re biking in the desert. Insane? Perhaps. Intense? Most definitely!
Lest you worry, we expect to be in cell phone range and Knox’s parents (whom I’ll finally meet!) will pick us up from Joshua Tree, or earlier if we wimp out… It would be great to bike all the way from Joshua Tree to Yuma, but there isn’t enough time.
The adventure awaits… as does my cab.
The boyfriend got featured in today’s Boston Phoenix.
I’ll have to fight off all the groupies now…
The first annual Boston Soup Swap was a phenomenal success!! Eleven soups, about twenty people. Good socializing, nice wine and snacks, and a fun swap! Since Knox and I both made soup, together we have a sample of everyone’s– except Mieszko’s borscht, which went before we could get to it.
The funny incident of the night: Knox, domestic diva that he is, told everyone how in Seattle, “we normally have it on a weeknight so that people can swap and then get the f**k out. But you can all stay and socialize amongst yourselves.” The room cleared in five minutes.
Knox and I decided to spend Christmas weekend in New York City. While we took the cheap Greyhound to get there, we splurged on a king-bed suite at the Murray Hill East Suites. We walked a lot around the city. Sight-seeing highlights included:
The New York Public Library, where we saw “The Splendor of the Word” exhibit on illuminated medieval manuscripts; the detailed workmanship is just amazing. We also saw the “I am with you” exhibit celebrating the sesquicentennial of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
The Sea, Air, and Space Museum on the aircraft carrier U. S. S. Intrepid, where I got to meander the flight deck and to walk through a British Airways Concorde. To be honest, the rest of the museum was too martial for my taste
Bodies: The Exhibition at the South Street Seaport Complex, one of several corpse shows making the rounds where we got to see plastified real corpses with various systems, organs, diseases, and malformations clearly displayed. Most ethereal of all were the displays of the human circulatory system: the blood vessels were preserved while the surrounding tissue was removed chemically, creating ghostlike impressions of human beings.
The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, where we saw the exhibit “Fashion in Colors,” in which every room was dedicated to examples of a given color in fashion. We also saw a smaller exhibit, “Yinka Shonibare Selects: Works from the Permanent Collection,” which included new pieces by Shonibare in his signature style depciting two of the museum’s founders.
The American Folk Art Museum whose permanent collection of art-by-the-masses has some curious and touching pieces. Most eye-catching, I thought, were the anonymous painted and ornamented insects made out of soda cans, which the museum picked up at a yard sale; a crocheted rug made entirely out of Wonder Bread bags and found in an old woman’s house upon her death; and a quilt made out of condom containers. One of the temporary exhibits, “Obsessive Drawing”, consists of works by people dealing with traumatic life events or just their own OCD.
We had excellent food as well (not even counting street vendors!):
Knox was sweet enough to get me the new Madonna CD last night. So far, Confessions on a Dance Floor strikes me as, well, disappointing. The first track, “Hung Up”, is catchy and danceable. But the other tracks? They’re just not getting me.
It pains me to admit this, since I am a big Madonna fan and have been since I first heard “Like a prayer.” I’ve consistently liked her albums, even if some songs here and there took a while to become familiar and likable.
Maybe this album will grow on me, too.
The Boston neighborhoods of Dorchester, Mattapan, and West Roxbury once hosted thriving Jewish communities. The people there were mainly orthodox Jews from Eastern Europe who immigrated in the late 1800s and moved to the area from their first Boston homes in the tenements of the North End. This southward displacement criss-crossed that of earlier Jewish immigrants from Western Europe who, having reached middle class, were already moving from their homes in the then-South End to Brookline and Newton.
Knox and I learned all this today as we were biking around the city with Dick, a guy we met through the folks at Hub on Wheels, who is also interested in designing a bike tour of Jewish Boston. Dick has already thought a lot about what such a tour would include, and today was all about going to see the sites on his list.
It’s amazing how much history one can glean if one looks in the right place. These neighborhoods are currently populated by working-class African-American communities. Many of the churches, however, were once synagogues, and magen Davids and menorahs still adorn the façades. Hebrew schools have found new life as parochial schools or community centers. The G & G Delicatessen, once the hub of neighborhood life and local politics, is now a hardware store, yet its old name is still laid out in a floor mosaic at the entrance.
I’m just beginning to learn about this whole topic; at the moment I’m working my way through Hillel Levine’s and Lawrence Harmon’s The Death of An American Jewish Community: A tragedy of Good Intentions, a book that appears to lay blame for the fragmentation of the Jewish neighborhoods on the notorious policy of redlining and unscrupulous practices by some real-estate brokers. I’d also like to read Gerald Gamm’s Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed for a different take on the same subject.
If you have any ideas for sites and history we can include in this bike ride– and particularly if you can recollect what Jewish life was like in these neighborhoods– we’d love to hear from you.
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