Tag Archives: Bahamas

On Privilege and Travel

August 2, 2016

This year, I had the privilege to travel to some fancy places where people live well. I live well now, but I didn’t grow up with money, and when you cross classes, when you weren’t born into the world you currently live in or the ones you occasionally visit, you feel that gulf more acutely. What people with money or born into money might take for granted is that money permits mobility. And sitting still sucks. Feeling left behind sucks. In high school, I was the only student in my French class who did not go on the bus trip to Quebec City because neither one of my divorced parents could afford to send me. There’s immobility for you—I literally sat at home while my classmates walked around Quebec, took in the sites, and practiced their French with very patient waiters at the city’s mid-level restaurants. In college, and during my twenties, there would be more financial troubles to come, including an expensive yearlong family court battle that would take a long time to dig out from. The household was too much of a mess to consider vacations or even weekend getaways. Travel—and really, experiencing the world in general—was not encouraged.

Which might explain why I couldn’t wait to get out on my own. (And how in a three-year period, we visited Quebec City—twice—and you should, too.)

Fast forward twenty-something years, and between March and May, I had a nine-week stretch where I went to four countries, one with my family and three on my own. This isn’t my norm any year. I visited Zurich, Switzerland; Positano, Italy; Exuma, the Bahamas, and Havana, Cuba. I came home wanting more. I am currently reading Elisabeth Eaves’ book “Wanderlust”, and early on, she references Thomas Jefferson warning his nephew that “Traveling makes men wiser, but less happy.” Jefferson seemed to be suggesting that travel triggers insatiability. After four countries in nine weeks, this feels painfully true. I’d like to say that I am enjoying a relaxing summer surrounded by the comforts of home, which I am, that I’m not in any rush, no planes, trains or buses to catch, but the reality is that on quiet, unstructured days, my mind drifts to where I’ve been and where I haven’t been. Sometimes I wonder if this is old wiring, of growing up in a household I didn’t want to be in, of not being able to afford things, and thinking about what to do and where to go next.

Unlike Ms. Eaves, I didn’t wander the world for years, and I applaud and envy those who do. I traveled in fits and spurts when I had some cash, often thinking “I didn’t yet go here” or “I haven’t yet tried that” but maybe my problem is that I’m still thinking like a 23-year-old. Maybe my 43-year-old self should just chill and say “Hey, look, at least you had the foresight to get up and see as much as possible whenever possible even while being discouraged to do so. Go you!” We need to learn to be kinder to our different selves. I am still learning this. I also need to recognize I won’t get to go everywhere, I won’t get to experience everything, but I have gone to many places and I have experienced many things, and there’s more to come. Did I backpack the world? No. Did I ever live without an address? No. But I’ve crossed socioeconomic classes and crossed oceans, and that’s more mobility than I ever could have predicted back when I was sitting at home, sixteen years old, waiting for my classmates to tell me how much they enjoyed Quebec. My daughter is twelve years old now, and, so far, has been to ten countries on four continents. She goes on class trips without issue. When she’s old enough, the world will be hers to backpack while I sit at home biting my nails, waiting for her emails and postcards. It sounds like such a simple middle class rite of passage, but to me, it will be a tremendous achievement.

Guava Cream Pie and Sunlight Addiction

April 19, 2016

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Our last few spring breaks have been quite cold. Our school district has spring break every April. Last April, we skied in Vermont; in 2014, we went in Iceland—beautiful and absolutely worth a repeat visit, but cold; in 2013, we were in Japan enjoying spring chill and cherry blossoms; in 2012 we were in Quebec freezing our butts off and warming up over pots of maple fondue, in 2011, we went to Cancun and Isla Mujeres, and in 2010, we visited Key West, Florida, more traditional spring break routes.

Growing up along the Great Lakes in the Snow Belt, that frigid stretch of the Northeastern United states that gets pummeled with “lake effect snow,” spring break always meant more than just a vacation. It was that much-anticipated week where you went somewhere to thaw out after months of cabin fever caused by playing too many board games or watching too much TV. You were sick of shoveling snow, helping your parents scrape ice off the car, and being yelled at by your mother for tracking dirty snow into the house from your snow boots. Spring break was synonymous with wearing fewer clothes, getting sunburned, leaping into giant, Smurf-blue swimming pools and drinking drinks made of colors too bright to exist back home, for who anyone north of Florida drinks Curaçao, that Windex-hued liquer flavored with laraha citrus?

I lived vicariously through other people’s interpretations of spring break. My family did not take springtime vacations, and we certainly didn’t go anywhere, not even anywhere nearby, to pass the school breaks. There was no money. Sometimes we went to a museum but most often we were left to fill our days on our own. I always felt jealous of the kids whose families flew to Florida for spring break, and to this day, I still find palm trees exotic despite having been around them now in several different countries. When I joke to friends that “palm trees give me the feels,” I mean it, because those shaggy fronds signal I’m somewhere else. In two years, we are hopefully moving to Los Angeles where I will wake up to palm trees and have the feels every day.

Palm trees are obviously a big part of the scenery at Great Exuma Island, one of dozens of islands in the Bahamas where we spent last week. Exuma is breathtakingly photogenic, and I Instagrammed the hell out of it. Now that I think of it, anywhere in the Caribbean gives me the feels; I’m always happy there. I mean this emotionally as well as biologically; I have seasonal affective disorder, and my vitamin D and serotonin levels were soaring in the Bahamas last week. I could feel the release. Less rumination. Less worrying. Sunshine is good for the soul. I loved sitting out on the front deck of our rented cottage and getting pummeled by sunlight. I loved admiring the trees’ silhouettes against a backdrop where sea and sky were almost the same shade of blue. I have a crush on the word “cerulean,” and that’s the word I kept thinking of while in Exuma, a chain of islands home to just 7,300 people, a place that is part of a much larger archipelago originally called Baja Mar or low seas. It is indeed very shallow in the Bahamas, a region where the focus is outward, towards the water, where people move more by yacht or catamaran or dingy. The commercialized Caribbean vibe makes it easy to forget the Bahamas was once the gateway to the New World, when one day that probably started out like all other days, a stranger in a boat approached. In 1492, Christopher Columbus first spotted what is now called San Salvador Island, about 93 miles from where we rented our cottage. The Caribbean hasn’t been the same since.

People—usually pale Americans, Canadians and Europeans—go to the Caribbean to do the following: snorkel, dive, boat, fish, sunbathe, and, later in the day, eat the things you saw while snorkeling, diving or fishing. I could live like this for months, but spring break is only a week long. We snorkeled almost every day we were in Great Exuma Island, either off our private cove, in Elizabeth Harbour near Stocking Island, or near some of the smaller cays where a red-faced, old-time Bahamian guy named Ray took us out on a boat tour. We swam with the famous wild pigs of Exuma, who have their own Instagram feed, and held piglets born on Valentine’s Day. Twice, we snorkeled small coral reefs, and once you were mask-down, you saw the cast of “Finding Nemo” going about their business; fish of every size and color, some striped, some shinier than others, some bug-eyed, some darting about like over-caffeinated New Yorkers late for something, some just sashaying about, and some slowly circling yellow or dark-orange colored brain corals. We quickly discovered that swimming with the fishes in the Bahamas means something entirely different from swimming with the fishes in New York.

Breathing through my snorkeling tube, I wondered what the fish thought of all these people coming through and spying on them. We held living starfishes big and small, we found sand dollars, we saw a barracuda swim past our boat, we saw conchs that still had their meat on them—and were hoping to get through the day without getting caught, for conch fritters and conch salad are on every menu everywhere around Exuma. Also on the menu: guava cream pie at the Driftwood Cafe in downtown George Town, where they also serve a delicious black bean burger. On three different occasions, I ate guava cream pie for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Pie does work as a side dish at any meal.

My daughter is not an adventurous eater, and I couldn’t interest her in the guava cream pie, but she’s adventurous in other ways. I could tell she was getting brave in the water. After a year on swim team, she was able to take full advantage of the snorkeling opportunities we had last week, and swimming has given her such confidence, that she started diving for shells and curiously poking around the reef to see more. We had taken her snorkeling in Key West six years ago, and tried to show her how to feed bits of pineapple to the fish, but she lasted less than 10 minutes in the water before freaking out. Last week, we had to beg her to get back on the boat, and once seated next to me, her skin pruned from a great time in the salt water, she smelled like a bag of potato chips.

I tried to memorize the colors of the Bahamas during our visit, for even while swimming through these colors, I knew as soon as I got back to suburban New York City, I would miss the high these colors delivered. However, Great Exuma Island wasn’t all beauty all the time—there’s no recycling program, and I tried to pack our emptied plastics and bottles, but they wouldn’t fit in our suitcases. I also wondered about the local waste management system since garbage was everywhere. It’s an island of mixed development, with pockets of poverty alongside flamingo-pink administrative buildings and an old yellow school with not much of a playground. These buildings are just down the road from only a few major resorts such as Sandals and Grand Isle Resort, all connected by the “Queen’s Highway” as it is known, one long paved road running down the middle of the island, which also joins Great Exuma to Little Exuma via a one-lane, one-way bridge. From the Queen’s Highway are countless unpaved roads filled with potholes, which was how we got to our cottage. We chose to vacation on Great Exuma Island because we didn’t want to hang out in a resort bubble. I didn’t want to interact with resort staff. Instead, I chatted up locals when I could, asking a conch fisherman about where he dives for dinner, and talked to a guy selling produce out of the back of his pickup truck what days of the week he came through George Town. Everyone we met was exceptionally friendly.

Being out of that bubble meant seeing some things that were upsetting, like piles of garbage or abandoned, rusting school buses or cars left at the side of the road, or empty homes with windows punched out like broken teeth. Yet it also meant unadulterated beauty and wandering the Tropic of Cancer beach on your own, a crescent of white powdery sand that’s at 23 degrees latitude and is going to get super-hot when the Summer Equinox rolls around in two months. The Tropic of Cancer beach is easy to miss, and we mistakenly drove by it twice. The painted line that you can straddle for your photo-op was once blue and is now bleached by the sun; it’s as understated as the fading signpost by the road indicating the Tropic of Cancer was just ahead. What was most impressive about this beach was not the imaginary line that runs across it, but how unsullied it was by anything or anyone. The Bahamians call it a “footprint-free” beach, and they’re not kidding; any footprints made are your own, and quickly disappear with the tide. Jersey Shore beaches are as crowded as highways, often barely a square foot of sand to pitch an umbrella, but here, my daughter ran races against her father and skipped around. The Tropic of Cancer Beach was one of the most beautiful swaths of land and landscape we had ever seen, and yet there were only two adults reading on the sand, two teen boys playing in the water, and that was it for a late Thursday afternoon. No conch fisherman. No rusting boats. No garbage in any direction. No paddleboarders or swimmers. No one standing over a cookout. And certainly nothing that characterizes most American East Coast beaches: no fried dough vendors or saltwater taffy stands or lifeguards looking bored by the job. Just a strip of sand being licked by soft waves of salt water. Just a beach the way beaches used to look.

Reluctant Hibernation

January 8, 2016

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I act like a bear in January. I cocoon on my sofa far too much and leave it reluctantly, unless, of course, I’ve got a salsa lesson, which is the best half-hour of the week. When not at salsa class (yes, some bears do dance), I skulk about our house looking for snacks—often, and I’m not joking here—smoked salmon. Fish is good for the brain and in the winter, my brain chemistry needs all the help it can get. January slays me every year (February, too, but I perk up knowing Daylight Savings and spring are just around the corner). If I could sleep away winter like bears do, I might, though I know no one would scoop the cat litter box while I hibernated. (I was disappointed to learn bears actually don’t hibernate as much as urban myth would have us believe. They’re out there in the woods, putting in the hours, which makes me think I need to get off the sofa more.)

What keeps me afloat this January is that starting in March and going into mid-May, I’ll be visiting some very gorgeous, warm places. I’ve been accepted to Sirenland, which still blows my mind, and despite a hatred (yes, hatred) of flying, I’m flying to Italy because no one has yet invented the technology to beam me there. Since I redeemed miles to make the trip, my journey is anything but direct. First I’ll be flying into Zurich, Switzerland, where I’ll spend a few days walking off a sedative hangover. Then I take a train through the Swiss Alps to Naples, Italy, which, honestly, I’m pretty stoked about. The distance is like training it from New York City to Buffalo; the idea of sitting on a train snaking through Europe will make me feel 25 again. I’m okay with this. Once in Naples, I join my fellow Sirenlanders and we pile into cars and make our way to Le Sirenuse in Positano, a jewel along Italy’s Amalfi Coast. Here, I’m expecting symptoms of Impostor Syndrome to strike—and to hit hard. Italian wine consumed in socially-acceptable doses will help.

Then in April, a four-day family spring break to Exuma, the Bahamas, because last spring break, we skied in Vermont and froze our butts off, making it feel like a repeated winter break as opposed to a true spring break. There’s a place in Exuma where we can swim with wild pigs. The pigs in Vermont are either rolling in cold mud or are transformed into charcuterie. The pigs in the Bahamas are clearly having more fun. I decided on a house rental here instead of doing the classic Caribbean-style resort. I spent four days at a resort in Mexico this past October (more on that another time), and I’m resorted-out. If I have to forage for meals every day with a house rental, so be it.

Which brings us to May, when I leave for Havana. Oh my gosh…people, I am giddy about this trip.

Thanks to President Obama relaxing some travel restrictions, among other factors, Havana is a city in flux right now. I’m going as part of the Cuba Writers Program. In November, I started salsa lessons because I decided I can’t go back to Cuba (I was there on assignment in 2003), and not dance. When I was there 12 years ago, music was everywhere; people danced in streets, in bars, along the Melacon. I’m not a keep-the-barstool-warm kind of gal anyway. I’ve had five lessons so far with a young Colombian-American guy who is sunshine in shoes. Salsa is a mood-lifter, better than Xanax, tequila, walking in sunlight or mocking bad poetry. It is the perfect antidote to January. What I’ve learned from signing up for dance lessons is that I need to keep dancing.

I’ll be home May 19, and after that, not really going anywhere for a while. Yes, maybe back to California in August, and always back to the Adirondacks. We can’t really afford all this travel—it’s not cheap—but when you get accepted to prestigious writing conferences, you pull out the plastic and go. And then you get the bill and spend your summer living off library DVDs and eating spaghetti knowing it was all worth it.

While eating cheap and mooching off the local library, I’ll spend the rest of the summer thinking “Was I really there???” And that’s why you take photos when you travel. It’s not to show off or maintain your perfect life via social media. It’s because the Earth is an extraordinary mix of contradictions; it is beauty and struggle; it feels large and small at the same time; it has rhythms that we’ve learned to predict and behaviors that continue to confound; it is hot and cold, harsh yet serene. The places we visit and love change like people, so to remember these places, you need a camera. Photos thread who we were then with who we are now, allowing us to look back and see ourselves sunbathing on that beautiful beach, hiking that huge mountain, posing in front of that yellowing, historic building, so we can say “Really, I was there.”

(PS: I didn’t take these photos. They came from that fascinating Black Hole known as the Internet.)

How Eating Waffles Inspired a Trip to See Pigs

November 8, 2013

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This always happens with freelancing: work that actually pays slows down a bit so I turn my attention to non-paying creative writing pursuits, like this blog and a manuscript for a novel. Then work that actually pays shows up in my inbox (and for that I am very grateful if any of my editors are reading right now), creative pursuits get sidelined, deadlines are met, invoices are paid, hopefully editors are happy, and suddenly it’s been weeks since I touched my blog or manuscript.

Time to dust off the blog today, despite deadlines, to share with you our favorite Sunday morning pastime—sitting around the table planning vacations.

I’ve mentioned my wanderlust here before, and a crumbling kitchen, not to mention two dead trees in our backyard that require professional removal, do not seem to quell my addiction in the least (a note about living in the suburbs: tree removal can cost thousands of dollars or the equivalent of an all-inclusive to the Caribbean). When the weather starts to suck, which for us is usually mid-November when all the glorious red and gold of fall has blown away, Sunday mornings are spent slowly. We slowly eat homemade gluten-free waffles while slowly perusing our various computer devices for vacation ideas. We sit at the table for hours doing this, so much so that we have spring break 2015 planned.

So what’s on the horizon after all this waffle-making and vacation-planning? Next month, we leave for Taos, New Mexico, to enjoy a Southwest Christmas, and then we’re crashing our friends’ wedding anniversary and New Year’s plans by staying at their place in Phoenix, Arizona. Returning to the Northeast after nearly two weeks out West will feel like it always does: a slap in the face. Some Jersey traffic will set us straight quickly.

Ok, but really happened over waffles was this: after we get back from the Southwest, in April, we’ll either visit Iceland for this awesome writers retreat or I’ll be squealing in multiple tongues because I will have been accepted into Sirenland, which takes place in Positano, Italy. Both conferences are fantastic, and I would be thrilled to attend either. Iceland would be a completely new experience for me. I traveled to Italy in 1996, but that was a four-day drive-through visit to Rome and Florence. The Amalfi Coast? That’s Rome’s pampered, beautifully blonde cousin, someone I need to get to know.

While outlining Spring Break 2014, our family decided on Spring Break 2015, and it involves pigs. We haven’t been to the Caribbean in years, despite discounts constantly plastered on the Internet and at bus stops, especially during long New York City winters, so in 2015, we’re going to spend a week swimming with the pigs in the Bahamas, which is far better than swimming with the fishes here. Wild porcines have taken over a cay called Exumas, and I have just got to see what this is about. In addition to hating planes, I hate boats, but there are some promising-looking tours that take you out for snorkeling and pig paddling, so I am open-minded about this. Mike thinks the water there will taste like bacon. Not salty water. Bacon. This isn’t surprising given that we planned this trip while eating waffles.