Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Perfection



Sitting on the porch of our cabin, facing the ocean, we ate breakfast and sipped mimosas while the chickens ran toward us, hoping for handouts. The hens and roosters milled around the flower beds surrounding the porch, pecking at insects or other spots they suspected might be food. The bravest, a black hen, came up on the porch, the better to catch crumbs that might fall on the deck.

Ben looked at me slyly, and turned to the fine-feathered rooster below him and said, “Cock!” He looked back at me impishly. “Cock!” he said again, more confidently. “And Carly” our female shepherd “is a bitch!” he added, chuckling.

“Oh, we’re 13 years old again,” I remarked, unable to keep from laughing. For a man who bellows four-letter words on the golf course, often using the same f-word as a noun, verb, adjective and adverb in the same sentence, he seemed to delight in the naughtiness of a couple of common nouns.

I could see pure joy in his face. He and I were having a perfect morning. I rose early and walked into town to find croissants for lunch sandwiches and a latte to drink on the beach. I returned to our cabin on the ocean at the Waimea Plantation Cottages on the west side of Kauai, and watched the sun rise over the morning clouds and the waves break on the red-sand beach. I sat out by the beach on an Adirondack chair with a book, a study in the anthropology of religion, and found it delightfully interesting, even though it had been close to incomprehensible in my exhaustion of the night before.

Ben returned from his morning run, waxing enthusiastically about his discovery of a pedestrian suspension bridge over the river and how the river ran down to the ocean to our beach, providing a perfect running path. Out on the porch, we opened a bottle of champagne and a carton of orange juice, broke open a package of blueberry muffins and shared a banana.

We were about as happy as two grouchy middle-aged, over-educated people – especially two as different as we are – can be together. For the moment at least.

Readers of this blog may often wonder “where’s the enjoyment?” Why do I travel so much and find so little joy in it? Why do I rent a $700 a night ocean-front room at the Grand Hyatt Kauai, and complain about the noise, the costs, the food, the kids, the loud adults, the leaf-blowing machines? Why not stay home?

The truth is, I am a perfectionist. I’m not perfect, I just want to be. And I want everyone and everything else to be, too. And if something isn’t perfect, then the whole kit and kaboodle can go to hell. Well, almost. Fact is, I can have a great time on a sunny day on the golf course in spite of my horrific score. I can enjoy a day at the pool with a few clouds. I can enjoy a meal at a nice restaurant even if the wine is overpriced.

But, paying $700 a night for a room at the Hyatt doesn’t ensure happiness. Indeed, it just buys you the opportunity to spend more money on overpriced services. A massage that costs $200, a buffet breakfast for $30 per person, a 2-ounce mimosa for $9. And, it doesn’t assure peace. We are surrounded by noise: noisy kids splashing around in the ostensibly adult pool; parents arguing with their children below our lanai at 6 a.m.; leaf-blowers replacing brooms on the pathways between our room and breakfast. The room loses its luxury patina once it is strewn with wet swimming trunks, wet golf clubs, dirty clothes, towels, extra pillows (does anyone really need eight pillows on the bed?) and half-consumed bottles of wine and cans of beer. We’re not really slobs, but we’re trying to live our lives in 350 square feet of space for five days.

But, a place like Waimea Plantation Cottages – with its ocean setting, its quiet (unsafe for swimming) black beach, its beautiful and tranquil grounds and roomy period cottages – harbors the potential for joy. Joy and peace.

So, here is the joy in traveling: finding a place that’s just perfect. Or perfect enough.

Sunday, December 9, 2007

Vacations with Ben


Sometimes vacations with Ben seem like a long string of meals. Go for a walk, but be back in time for breakfast. Lie by the pool until it’s time for lunch. Take a nap, walk on the beach, pass the time until we dress for dinner.

Ben likes his vacations simple. They are the vacations of a working urbanite who puts in long hours, leaving for the office before daylight and returning home after sunset. They don’t strain the imagination; they don’t demand heightened senses of awareness in strange surroundings. They are filled with golf, swimming pools and dining rooms. They are perfect for a man who has plenty of excitement at work: deadlines, breaking news stories, difficult sources, complaining readers.

It took me a long time to get used to this kind of vacationing. My family didn’t do vacations much, and certainly not vacations in high-end hotels with fancy restaurants and more than one pool. I remember two or three vacations as a kid: a camping trip to Wisconsin, about six hours away from our Iowa home; one to the Lake of the Ozarks, to a cabin on the lake with the sound of waves breaking outside the windows, a sound that kept me awake all night. I think there might have been another one, but I’m not sure it wasn’t the same as the Ozarks trip.

Ben’s family didn’t go to expensive hotels, either, but he does remember the anticipation of driving into the parking lot of Howard Johnsons or Holiday Inns on family vacations, the anticipation of a hotel pool and vending machines. He remembers driving to the family cabin in Northern Wisconsin and spending hours in a fishing boat on the lake, relaxing, far from the hectic world of the Chicago advertising agencies where his father worked. I understand why his father wanted peace and quiet, and why Ben does too. (And then, there was his mother, whom I invited to go on a cruise to Alaska with me shortly after his father died. “Why would I want to go somewhere I haven’t been before?” she asked, absolutely seriously.)

I’ve learned to accept these laid back vacations – even enjoy them – because they aren’t the only vacations I take. My own sense of the perfect vacation has no origin I can put a finger on: it probably was the simple result of wanting to get out of a small town in Iowa, and go as far away as humanly possible. I travel with my friends to places that Ben wouldn’t find relaxing: Mexico, Peru, Guatemala, Ecuador, Bolivia. They are full of suspense and surprise. Occasionally, they require cunning: we get ourselves into a fix and have to put our wits together to get out of it.

When Janet, my favorite traveling companion, and I travel together, mealtimes are often unwelcome necessities. We put them off as long as possible. The food is usually poor and bland, and I don’t have enough fingers to count the times I have come home with campylobacter or salmonella poisoning from eating abroad. Janet comes home with respiratory distress; I come home with intestinal parasites.

This is not to say that I don’t like to eat when I’m on vacation with Ben. I eat way too much. I love food. I weigh at least 20 pounds more than I should because of it. But, sometimes, after a week on vacation with my husband, I start to dread mealtimes. I’m not hungry. Still, I can’t skip them, because they are the only excitement of the day – the only moments of discovery and sensory stimulation.

Yesterday was such a day. Today was too. The difference between the two is that the sun finally came out today, and finally, Hawaii looked like the Hawaii of postcards. We lay by the pool, ordering beers and screwdrivers, slipping into the water whenever we got too warm. We read. We talked a little. At some point, we agreed it was time for lunch. Now, I am reading and writing while Ben takes a nap.

Tonight, we will have dinner at Dardano’s a restaurant in the Grand Hyatt Kauai, where we are staying, and it will be excellent. I will fall asleep shortly after dinner, comatose with the carbohydrates of pasta and wine. Somewhere in the middle of the night, I will wake up, thanks to the red wine, and take a couple of Advils to go back to sleep.

Later this week, I will return to Seattle tan and rested, and Ben, I hope, will too.

Saturday, December 8, 2007

Rain, limitless rain

Poipu Bay, Kauai

Yesterday, standing over my ball on the 16th tee at Poipu Bay, I pulled my driver back and felt the wind whipping the club head back and forth.

“Quit it!” I yelled to whoever was in charge of the wind. “Just quit it!” I have trouble enough hitting the ball square anyway, I certainly didn’t need the extra challenge of squaring up a wobbly club head.

By this point, I should have realized it didn’t really matter. Only Tiger Woods can score well playing in the conditions we faced. There wasn’t one pleasant moment. Under heavy gray clouds all day, our conditions varied from driving downpours that came at us horizontally, to lazy downpours that felt a like a heavy-duty rain shower in a bathroom, to wind gusts that made it difficult to stand still. The rain poured off the bill of my Ben Miller Invitational Golf Tournament hat, and after the first hole, there was no chance of keeping the club grips dry. My Goretex rain pants totally failed, and my Goretex coat was as wet inside as it was outside. I got diaper rash on my butt from sitting in the puddle that formed on the golf cart seat.

We have always come to Hawaii in November or December. That’s when Ben’s vacation time seems to finally build up to the point he can take a week off. And, right before Christmas, the resorts and roads are at their quietest, anticipating the holiday onslaught of tourists with kids. One year, our vacation started before Christmas and included Christmas eve and day. The first few days of the trip were pleasant and quiet, but then the children came, invading the pools and restaurants, and our trip went to hell.
Now, we plan to get here and home before the holidays, ensuring ourselves a little peace.

However, after this trip, we may reconsider our December choice. Since we got here, it’s been rainy, windy and gray. We have this weather at home; we don’t have to fly six and a half hours to see rain.

But stuck here now, we’re trying to make the best of it. We arrived on Wednesday night, and teed off at Poipu Bay at 10:00 on Thursday. The day was blustery, and we had a few sprinkles. But we had rain coats and it wasn’t bad … until the 18th hole. Then, the deluge started – the one that hasn’t stopped since – and we were miserably soaked by the time we finished the par 5. Ben and I both got a 9 on the hole, we’re not great golfers under adversity.

Actually, we’re not great golfers under any conditions. But, we’re trying, and we’ve lately devoted all of our joint vacations to finding beautiful places to swing clubs, drink a little beer, drive the cart, and, in Ben’s case, swear a bit. We’ve played in Puerto Rico, California, on the Big Island, here on Kauai, in Couer d’Alene and all over Washington. It’s a great way for a couple – especially one that seems to have few other hobbies in common – to spend time together and play.

One time in Couer d’Alene, we faced similar conditions – driving rain and fierce winds – but because it was also about 50 degrees out, I was able to convince Ben to stop playing after nine holes. Yesterday, as we tackled the coursse for the second day, Ben insisted we continue. It might be raining, but it’s a warm rain.

So, down the fairways we went yesterday, and down went our games. It rained so hard that by the time we were on the 15th hole, we decided the casual water rule pretty much covered the entire golf course, and if we didn’t like our lie, we could move the ball to a drier one (if one could be found). It didn’t help our scores much, but it relieved us from having to try to hit balls out of mud puddles.

By the time we reached the clubhouse, there wasn’t one dry spot on us or our clubs. We ran to the car, threw our wet gear and clubs in the trunk and rushed to the hotel for a shower. I brought my clubs into the room, so I could dry them off later, and stripped off my soaked clothes. It seems paradoxical that a shower can feel good after getting soaked in an 18-hole downpour, but it did. After a room service lunch, a glass of wine and a nap, I felt whole again.

Today, we rose to more gray skies, and the heavy rain showers continue. We aren’t playing golf in it, though, so we’ve had a chance to just sit back and marvel and the amount of water that can fall from the sky. I had a massage, and the rain came down so hard, the masseuse had to close the windows of the massage room. (The massage, by the way, was terrific, though very pricey at about $200 after tip.) We snuck over to the golf pro shop to take advantage of the 35%-off sale (off of everything, not just “selected merchandise”), and managed to get there and back between deluges.

Now, Ben is watching Wisconsin play basketball on the room TV. I’m sitting out on the deck of our room, which faces the ocean, and watching the seemingly limitless rainfall. It makes me homesick for our weather in Seattle, and that’s saying something.

Monday, December 3, 2007

Wintery Winter Park

Winter Park, December 3, 2007

I have spent three days in Janet’s house, and I have to wonder: How do these walls stay up with all the stuff she has hung on them? I’ve told Janet this before, so she won’t be insulted.

I really love her little condo – actually not so much the condo itself, but the decor. It wouldn’t be my choice of a place to live, but she’s got the decorating sense of a quilter, which she is. She puts together textures and colors – also cultures and locales – in the random, eclectic way a quilter combines fabrics of different textures and designs. The only thing that restricts the combinations is the fit – and even that is negotiable. The effect is the colorful and fun of barely controlled chaos.

What I’m really jealous of is her loft, which she has devoted to her quilting projects. It’s an entire room that doesn’t have to accommodate any other uses or humans. What luxury!

When I arrived on Friday afternoon, we had a celebratory glass of wine – a nice Rhone blend, and then took off for lunch at Fontenot’s, a Cajun restaurant, for gumbo (for me) and fish and chips (for her). The gumbo was decent, but nothing to write home about. Then, we visited the wine tasting room of a friend of hers, where Janet left some wine-themed throw pillows that she hopes to sell at the tasting room. I liked them so much I bought three myself.

Since we planned to go to the spa the next day, and I had left home without thinking to buy a bathing suit, we checked at BJammin’ – a sportswear shop that specializes in beach and ski wear. Maybe the word “specializes” doesn’t make any sense in that context. But, in any case, I found a suit that fit, and quickly concluded that no one – no one but Paris Hilton, perhaps – should try on a swim suit in the middle of winter, when pasty-white cellulite looks its worst. Yuck! A little suntan on those upper thighs would help some – maybe not a lot, but some!

We returned home, opened a bottle of wine to celebrate my new job (I’m starting a new one Dec. 17) and watched Sea of Love on cable. We’re such wild and crazy girls!

Snowshoeing up Elk Creek the next day was spectacular. We got about 6 inches of perfect powder Friday night, and I was thankful I’d rented an SUV for the trip. We made fresh tracks with the Highlander back to the trailhead, and from there, created sloppier first tracks with our snowshoes.

The tree branches and the trail were decorated with fluffy caps of fresh snow. It was clear, sunny and – hey! What happened to the oxygen around here!? I quickly realized that I had come from sea level to about 9900 feet above sea level in two days, and I had some serious oxygen deprivation. But, Janet was patient, I got over my embarrassment of huffing like a life-long smoker, and we made our destination and turned around. Coming back was more of a downhill slope and I began to feel a little more competent. It had been a long time since I snowshoed, but I quickly rediscovered it truly is just like walking. Funny walking, but walking.

We had dinner at a nice restaurant, Untamed Grill, with a bottle of wine (a malbec). I would recommend it if you’re really hungry and don’t mind spending at least $25 a person. I had great prime rib and Janet had a tasty, but perhaps too complicated, dish of beef medallions on couscous cakes with brie and a fine, tasty sauce. We both voted for the prime rib, and split our dishes. No dessert necessary.

On Sunday, I pulled my back trying to help Sam – her ancient, sweet black lab – up on the bed, after he faltered about half-on, half-off. I spent the rest of the day on the couch, leaning against hot pads and ice packs and watching the NFL. Not a great way to spend a nice sunny day in Winter Park. I always seem to hurt myself – or at least something related to my spine – when I visit Janet. We had dinner at Mama Falzitto’s, an Italian place that I highly recommend. Lots of food for the money, and the cobbler dessert was wonderful.

I returned to Seattle on Monday. Alaska boarded the flight early, in anticipation of trying to beat some of the bad weather in Seattle, but then we sat on the tarmac for an hour in Denver while the mechanics dealt with some mechanical issues. The flight was very bumby coming into Seattle, thanks to the Pineapple Express – the flow of Hawaii winter storms, which bring warm weather and monsoons to the Northwest every December.

I nearly got frostbite Monday morning, as I scraped ice off my windows. I had forgotten how cold temperatures below zero feel.

All in all, it was a great trip, most notably for getting to see Gina, Jenny and Janet. I’m very lucky to have such great friends and nieces.

Sunday, December 2, 2007

Colorado Visiting

Winter Park, CO, November 29-December 1

I lived in Denver for more than 10 years. Ben and I moved there back in 1990, when I was thinking it would be my last hometown. White peaks on the horizon beckoned us to ski and snowboard in the winter. Purple peaks on the horizon called us to hike and backpack. The Broncos, Avalanche, Nuggets and Rockies kept Ben entertained. Technology, computer storage and dot-com companies gave us an Internet boom rush in the late 90s.

We lived in the Washington Park neighborhood, and we knew our neighbors well. We sat on our front porch with the dogs in the evening, drinking beer and watching the parade of people drawn to the Old South Gaylord shopping district's bars and restaurants. I worked at home for the first five years, then drove south on I-25 to the Tech Center for three years to work at a mining company and northwest to downtown to work at a public relations firm for a couple more.

But at some point, I got itchy feet. I have attachment issues that I blame on my long stint in an incubator after my pre-mature birth. I can’t stay anywhere very long. I don’t make many close friends, and those that I do make, I keep at a safe distance. So, after 10 years in one place, I started to feel like I’d been there long enough. I thought I recognized every face I saw on the 16th Street Mall. I grew tired of our house. The local authorities refused to let us build an addition on the back that would have preserved the garden landscaping we had installed on the south side of the house and would have preserved our north-side neighbor’s sun. I’ll never understand their objectives; they were actually encouraging pop-tops with their rules.

A job offer in Seattle was my ticket out. I’ll probably never move back.

But visiting is something else. Thanks mainly to the great friends I still have in Colorado, I usually have a fine time here, and usually don’t have time to see everyone I want to see or do everything I want to do.

When I arrived last Wednesday afternoon to a frozen city with an icy frosting of left-over snow, I drove straight to Argonaut Liquors on Colfax to stock up on wine offerings to pass out over the week. I remembered the store for having a big wine selection, and it still does.

At the cozy house of my friend Gina, we relaxed and shared some wine before heading out in the cold to dinner at Panzano Restaurant on 17th St. in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. I remembered it for its good pizza, but I decided to try the lasagna. Bad choice. A layer of dry, crumbly ground beef on the bottom was topped by some sticky layers of lasagna noodles, which was smothered with a grossly sweet marinara sauce. There was no cheese. Lasagna without ricotta or mozzarella or parmesan cheese! This was the laziest and poorest presentation of one of my favorite dishes I’ve ever had. Thankfully, the plate of big, fat, buttery breadsticks sated my hunger so I wasn’t totally disappointed.

On Thursday morning, Gina and I ran some errands – I had to send a FedEx package, she needed to pick up some rocks for her new landscaping, and we picked up eight of her dress jackets, which she had altered at the tailor’s shop. I bought some presents and a clock for our Palm Springs house at a great gardening store called Birdsall’s, where Gina once tested her patience for retail work.

We ate Mexican food at a restaurant along South Broadway. I ordered in Spanish, always looking for a chance to practice. However, the waitress was apparently embarrassed that she didn’t speak Spanish, so she didn’t bother to tell me. Therefore, although I ordered chile verde with flour tortillas, I received chile rellenos with corn tortillas. It wasn’t until we were eating that I overheard her talking with her daughter on the phone and to the cook in the kitchen – all in English.

Midway through the afternoon, I headed south to Colorado Springs to visit with my niece and her 10-month-old baby, Marshall, whom I had yet to see. I loaded up on meatloaf and five sides (including everyone’s favorite – creamed spinach) at Boston Market and drove more than a dozen miles east and north of the city to the suburban development where she is renting a home. It was dark by the time I got through the nasty, slow snarl of construction-menaced traffic to her neighborhood, and therefore, spent about a half hour lost and unable to read the street signs in the dark. Finally, after a frantic phone call – interrupted by signal interruptions – I reached the house to find Jenny and Marshall waiting at the door for me.

Jenny is my oldest brother’s daughter, and she recently took a job as a public defender. We look a slight bit alike. Marshall is quite possibly the best and most beautiful baby in the world, as her father will tell you. With a shock of curly brown hair and a perpetual smile, she sat on the floor happily trading toys and saliva with Jenny’s two dogs, Zoey and Swindle. The dogs play gently with Marshall, and he is not afraid of their big tongues or Swindle’s wagging tail.

Once Marland got home from work bearing a gift of zinfandel for dinner, he and I sat down and ate. Then while Marland watched Marshall, it was Jenny’s turn. I managed to make dinner last through both of these sittings.

The night passed quickly, and I found myself back on the road by 7 a.m. It took no time to find a Starbucks in the neighborhood Safeway, but thanks to some 13-year-olds’ need for blended foo-foo drinks at 7 in the morning, it took nearly 20 minutes to get my latte. Once on the road, I took I-25 to US 85 north to C-470. From there I zipped around the south and west sides of Denver, caught I-70 west without running into a bit of rush-hour traffic. This trip is much easier than I expected it to be at that time of day.

I reached my friend Janet’s condo outside of Winter Park long before noon. A snow storm was approaching, it’s heavy grey clouds just starting to spill over the mountain peaks, but I got there first.