This is me on a pancake. Story on the blog. #pancakeselfie
Post: https://www.travelcraftjournal.com/pancake-making-machine/
September 14, 2015
Landmark Routes
When you get to a new city, do you ever find yourself using one particular route as your main reference for navigating the area? It doesn’t have to be the main street, just your main street – somewhere that connects where you’re staying with places you want to go.
It may not even be a regular surface street. It could be a transit line, a freeway, a pathway. It’s where you say, “if I can find _____, I can follow it to where I need to be.”
For example, our Denver-area friends humored us by aways giving us directions – whether it was to the Botanic Gardens or just a nearby drugstore – that started us off on Arapahoe Road. Since that’s how we got to their house, that’s where we felt most oriented.
(Farther north, my Denver street of choice becomes Colfax, because it goes all the way across town and still passes landmarks I remember from childhood, like Casa Bonita and Elitch’s.)
When I spent a summer in Sevilla, Spain, there was a particular bus (maybe the 34-?) that stopped near our dorms, ran by several of the University’s campuses and to the city center. Most of the time, it was the only bus I needed. If I ended up in another part of the city, I just had to find a 34 bus, and it would take me home.
Is there a name for this type of central navigational lifeline? I feel like we need one. Landmark route? Reference road?
I’m open to suggestions.
—
PS Yes, that last photo (probably taken by someone in our group) is a skinnier, not-glasses-needing, 1999 version of me in Sevilla. ¡Viva España!
Moving in
We finally have everything moved over to the new place – bookcases that need to be reunited with their shelves, a disassembled desk, an armchair that’s still covered in shrink wrap, stacks of boxes and bags and baskets.
But we got our bed set up. And the coffeemaker plugged in. And, even if there’s nowhere to sit in the living room, the patio is quite cozy.
Despite this cardboard jungle phase, it’s already starting to feel like home.
—
Awash
I have a packed suitcase, and I won’t be sleeping in my own bed tonight – but I’m not going anywhere.
My bed, my dresser, and various other furniture items and boxes of things are already in our new place, down the road.
Moving is a little like standing in a doorway. Or like the feeling when the edge of an ocean wave foams up over your ankles and then pulls back, dragging the sand beneath your feet with it, until just when you think you might lose your footing completely, and it withdraws, leaving you alone to steady yourself in the sand. Piece by piece, everything shifts, and then it’s done, and you find your balance again.
Tonight, we’ll roll out sleeping bags on the floor. In a matter of days, we’ll have these rooms emptied and cleaned out, and we’ll lock the door on the bittersweet memories of our years here and begin to settle in to a new space.
It’s only a few miles away, but it feels like a fresh start.
Grandma’s Sunburn Remedy
I sunburn easily.
I blame my genes. Basically, I descend from a mélange of peoples, who, I assume, just kept walking north until they got to the regions of Europe that were cold and cloudy enough not to punish their pallid skin.
Generations later, I was born in sunny Phoenix, Arizona, wearing the maladapted melanin of my kin. Here, summer rays can be intense enough to burn a Celtic lass like me within 10 minutes.
My grandma used to tell me to put vinegar on sunburns. “The sooner the better,” she’d say. Being a teenager, I’d roll my eyes and/or ignore her advice.
Then, after one sunburn that left my skin ablaze like a village after a Viking* raid, I finally gave in and tried it. The pain was gone almost instantly. I did smell like vinegar, but I had no intentions of going back outside anytime soon anyway.
Now I wear a moisturizer with sunscreen in it daily. If I do get a sunburn, I have no problem reaching for the vinegar and gently daubing some on. Totally worth smelling like a salad dressing (or maybe a jar of pickles) for a few hours.
—
*I also have Viking ancestors. I like to think of them as not the village-destroying type, though. Maybe horned-hat-wearing and fierce – like you wouldn’t want to mess with them – yet somehow kind hearted. (This may not be historically accurate.)