Seeking Beauty on Roads Less Traveled

"See, it says right here....Elephant Breeding/Birthing Center...Chitwan National Park. We can play with baby elephants and bathe them! Now that sounds like fun and where else would we be able to do that?  Definitely want to bathe a baby elephant." I said it. I admit it. I was on a mission...The only thing to be decided was how to get to Chitwan. Fly or drive. "Lets drive - this way we can see more of the country." I said it. I admit that too. I made a few bad judgment calls this trip and this was at the top of the list. Note to all: given the choice between flying or driving in Nepal? Opt for flying. "You need shock absorbers," we try to explain to our driver after enduring a 6-hour ride from Kathmandu to Chitwan. Imagine us acting out the need for shock absorbers. "And what happened to the air conditioning which is now blowing air that feels hotter than the 100 degree temperatures outside?" Opening the windows leads to a respiratory nightmar

"Why are they stopping cars? What are they looking for?," I ask my Mom and our driver at yet another police road block in Kathmandu. If monkeys roaming free, goats, people desperately seeking a non-existant sidewalk, chaotic drivers and their one-step-away-from-the-scrap-metal heaps of vehicles, chickens, pedi-cabs, and pseudo-rickshaws...oh, and stalled out cars and toppled over trucks and heaps of trash aren't enough to bring the incessant flow of traffic to its inevitable halt (I don't think we ever saw the speedometer go over 15 miles an hour anywhere in Nepal) then I guess the police checkpoints will take care of any travel progress. I guess they weren't looking for us because our car and driver were continuously waved through....I still don't know what the police were looking for and I guess I never will. As with so many things in Kathmandu, some things are best left not understood. It has taken me a few weeks to share my thoughts about our travel

Slated to be next on our vacation radar screen...Nepal. It is fair to say, in some respects, we have a small idea of what to expect courtesy of fellow travelers and the Lonely Planet guide to Nepal. We know there will be baby elephants we can feed and bathe. We know there's the tallest mountain in the world to see. We know Tibet is right next door (wishing we had gone to Tibet earlier, before the Chinese started their cruel and systematic decimation of a culture.) During an off-the-cuff conversation the other day, an acquaintance tells me he recently lost 15 pounds without even trying. "Really? What's your secret?". He said, "I just came back from 2 weeks in Nepal. Enjoyed the visit but couldn't eat the food". Silently, I'm panicking. I've never traveled to a country where I didn't find something yummy to eat. Be it pad thai or fried bananas in Thailand, eggplant rollatini and bistecca florentine in Italy, pho (noodle soup) and spri

"But it's not quite my birthday yet," I tell my Mom as she hands me a big purple envelope with a card inside before we sit down to eat at her apartment in Brooklyn. "Yeah, I know but you like to display your birthday cards for a few days before and look at them...besides we all know how it is Birthday Month for you", she tells me whilst she puts our salads with mulberries we picked ourselves and pecans, that we didn't pick ourselves, on the table for dinner. It's a gorgeous card. It is crocheted beyond the point of detailed...pink, red, yellow and white-colored flowers with lovely crocheted green leaves embellished with faux gemstones in the center of each flower. Plus there's lots of bling around the border. Wow! There must be hundreds of stitches that combine to make this crocheted floral bouquet. "It's beautiful," I tell her and I mean it as I open the card to read the poem she has written inside... "Happy, happy, happy

I am back in New York City. I am home. Our friends Chip and John have come to visit tonight. They are best friends to Mom and I. The fact that they have actually viewed all 1,300 photos of our Ireland trip puts them in a whole other category of best friends just for enduring all those photos. "Oh, you've got mail...a post card", Chip said as he enters my apartment. He hands it to me and I say, "What are you talking about, Chip?" as I hug him hello. "It's 7p.m. I already picked up my mail". "Well, you forgot this", he tells me. It's a post card that Chip and John saved from a trip John took to Ireland back in 1998. Being funny, they thought they would pretend they were there when we were. Last week. "Oh, wait a second. Where did you get this post card?" I ask as I look at it...and look at it again because I can't believe what I am seeing. "When we were in Ireland. We thought we'd bump into yo

Please tell me how to explain to a 3-year old girl named Orla and her 5-year old sister Emma why it is 10 days after the day we were meant to arrive in Ireland and we are still not there?  After all, Orla has a list of favorite places she wants to share with us and her Mom, Erin said her "friends from America" are coming to visit, so why aren't we there?  Oh, I suppose you can show pictures of the Icelandic volcano spewing its ashes into the atmosphere. One can explain the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean;  how we live in New York City and they live in County Kerry, Ireland.  How we need to take a 6 1/2 hour flight from NYC to Shannon Airport and yes, good luck explaining how once in a million years, a volcano in between those two points acts exactly like a volcano is suppose to act, resulting in an airplane transportation fiasco. Heck, it's a hard concept for me to understand, mostly because I don't want to understand it if it means my vacation is now a non-vacatio

If someone asked me to comment about Tulsa, say. a week ago, I would have said, "Why?"   As a native New Yorker who had never even been to Oklahoma before I would have nothing of merit to add to a conversation about Tulsa.  I know that Tulsa is in Oklahoma. You can look at a map and find that out.  You don't need me to tell you.  I will also say that I never thought I'd be writing a sentence, let alone a whole story that included the word Tulsa.  I guess now is also the time to admit that although I do know where Oklahoma is, I did need to take out the in-flight magazine to see that Tulsa sits in the northeastern portion of the state.  I am also guilty of a visual picture of Tulsa that solely included tumbleweeds and old oil rigs...and that's it.  And yet, I am excited about going to Tulsa for one big reason...I have never been before. Why is it that I seem to be the only one excited to be going to Tulsa?  I'll only be there for a day and yet everytime I say

Most of our days whilst in Puerto Rico started with the best of intentions and a map (or two or three)-in-hand that turned out to be good for lots of things...as a placemat, a decorative item, fold it up and make a paper airplane.  Lots of purposes except that which it was intended - to guide us.  A huge apology right here and now to my Mom who, not working with much in the way of map accuracy, had to put up with my less-than-calm lost driver personality. That persona is right up there with my  "I'm hungry" feed-the-animal personality.  Yes, it rhymes with witch. We saw some roads during our driving meanderings that were nowhere to be found on any of our maps.  Others that started out promising and then just vanished only to reappear miles later where one would never expect them to be.  Then there's Route 181 through the mountains; a no-guard rail, narrow winding road which should, under no circumstances, be a two-way road.  But oh, yes, it is!  Who's going to v

I know this may sound corny but it still fascinates me that I can be sipping on a mango daiquiri ,  enjoying balmy breezes, sunshine and temperatures somewhere around 85 degrees, listening to the Caribbean Sea lapping its waves against the shoreline in one moment and then less than 24 hours later, wham!  The snowstorm of 2010 has arrived in NYC with snowfalls ranging around 10 inches and a balmy temperature of 32 degrees.  Yes, yes, there was airplane travel in between those two experiences and yes, I understand the aerodynamics of flying but still...it all seems so surreal to me. Back to those mango daiquiris....they can be found at an amazing little restaurant called Tranquilidad del Mar in the town of Patillas on the island of Puerto Rico.  I've never had a mango daiquiri that came served with whipped cream on top (as a matter of fact when it was first brought to the table I thought, "Whipped cream in a daiquiri?  What?!)  but my goodness, try it...you'll definitely l