I had been missing Northern Michigan fiercely. It’s hard to be away from home, and even my husband, West Texas boy that he is – he missed the Mitten, too. So, we planned a long weekend visit to my family in late August. Nothing special; just a weekend when we could find cheap flights. A little cooler weather to break the monotony of the unrelenting Houston heat and some time “Up North” to complete our summer.
One day during our trip to Valencia, my husband got it into his head to climb to the top of the Micalet. The Micalet is a cathedral in the center of Valencia’s old town that features a Gothic-style, octagonal bell tower and winding, spiral staircase with an ungodly number of stairs.
For our recent trip to London, at the top of the must-do list was taking the train from Waterloo to Hampton Court Palace. Of all the palaces in and around London, and there are a fair few of them, Hampton Court was really on my radar. For two Anglophiles like my husband and me, it seemed a Mecca, a holy grail of sorts for our interests. We’d watched so many BBC specials about the Tudor Monarchs, Castles of Britain, the Secrets of Hampton Court and all the like, that to actually have a ticket that would take us to a place almost mythical in its majesty seemed a dream come true.
Have you ever had it happen that a thing you imagined in your mind, something you saw with your heart and created within yourself … that this “thing” came true? A dream, or a setting of a place that you read about and pieced together and wished, wished, wished to someday explore for yourself, even though you knew it was not real, was made up. A place from a time long ago, a place that never was, a place that was no more, or had never been.
Èze. I’d never heard of it before, wasn’t even certain how to pronounce it. We found it by chance, just by zooming in and out on an internet map of the French Riviera. The images that came up on the search looked lovely, and on a whim, we booked a hotel and eagerly awaited our trip.
Monaco… the word alone conjures up images of James Bond movies, glamour and Grace Kelly, the Golden Days of Hollywood. Those images are not far off from reality – in fact, on my recent trip to this tiny city-state in France, all of those images became truer than I could have ever imagined.
My husband loves electronic dance music. The thumping beats, the unrelenting rhythm of the tempo, the way the music moves through your body almost to your core to the cadence of your heartbeat.
When it comes to museums, I am spoiled. Some of my favorite haunts are not necessarily big-gunners like The Louvre or the Met, but I’ll visit the Mauritshuis in the Hague, the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, or the Art Institute of Chicago over and over again. So, on a recent trip to Los Angeles, the idea of spending some leisure hours at the Getty Center Museum was more than welcome.
I have been to California a few times – San Francisco, Napa, lots of wine country gallivanting and Bay Area exploring. But visiting Los Angeles always seemed, to be honest, a little daunting.
Recently, I took a trip with my husband out to west Texas. He is from San Angelo, which is a “big city” in that part of the state, but we found ourselves farther west than even that. Seven hours west of Houston, three hours west of Austin, is the tiny, one-horse town of Rowena. A town with two gathering places: one a VFW hall and the other, Lord knows what. All the same, two facilities for any kind of celebration or meeting the little town might have, which was confusing to me. Surely, there was no reason for two halls – not in a town this size.
What comes to mind when one hears the words, “Scottish Highlands?” Probably a romanticized version of brave men in tartans and green hills and craggy rocks, perhaps one hears bagpipes playing. It’s a pretty picture. But though the Highlands are romantic and green and craggy … they are also cold, wet, and terribly out of the way.
