Seeking Beauty on Roads Less Traveled

Let me set the scene for you...The scene being a beautiful restaurant in New York City within Fort Tryon Park in Manhattan called the New Leaf Cafe.  It is a hop, skip and a jump from the Cloisters and with its surrounding gardens and stunning views of the Hudson River and the George Washington Bridge, it seems miles away from the urban jungle that is New York City.   Yet beyond the stone structure that is the restaurant, beyond the terrace and the herb garden that the chef makes good use of are the streets of Washington Heights and the reality and cacophony that is NYC on any given day.  Imagine an oasis from NYC and that is New Leaf. There are not many places to host an afternoon garden party tea luncheon in NYC.  Oh, there is Lady Mendl's Tea Salon at the Inn at Irving Place but they do not have a garden to accommodate 75 guests and musical performances and such.  New Leaf was THE spot to make this happen as I envisioned f...

"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 vacatio...