My work took me to Beirut, Lebanon, where I was able to take a tour of the Holy Land. Flew from Beirut to West Bank – Jerusalem, where I stayed near the Garden of Gethsemane, which I visited, then to the old city, walked the Stations of the Cross, visited the church on the site of Christ’s crucifixion, the Wailing Wall, inside the Al Aksah Mosque. Bus to ruins of Jericho, and bus to Bethlehem where I bought several Christmas cards and mailed them from that post office (via surface mail in October so they arrived in the USA in early December), Church of the Nativity, bus to the Dead Sea in which I swam. Flight back to Beirut had to change planes in Amman, Jordan, to have an unauthorized passenger be removed. A interesting spiritually-satisfying interdenominational 3-day vacation.
I have a few vacation stories to tell.
In 2003, Mom was a member of the Television Without Pity forums, and one of her friends invited the members of their West Wing forum to visit her in Los Angeles. She rented a penthouse hotel room near Santa Monica, and we visited for a few days. We watched some West Wing on VHS tapes recorded from the original broadcast, back before they released them on DVD. We visited the WB Lot and saw the set of Friends and a second-floor visitor center room that was entirely dedicated to Harry Potter. They even had the petrified Hermione. I went down to the Santa Monica Pier and dipped my feet into the Pacific Ocean for the first time (and so far the only time). Good times.
In 2016, we bought a new Toyota Prius and my sister, who lives in Nevada, had need of a new car herself. So Dad and her boyfriend Tim came up from Florida to our place in Virginia, and then they drove the PT Cruiser, while we drove the Prius, all the way to Nevada to visit my sister and leave her the PT. (Which she promptly totaled within a month.) It was my first time visiting several states, at least on the ground. We didn’t really get to stop and smell the roses as much as I would have liked to, though.
And in 2019, we went on a cruise to The Bahamas. Carnival Sunrise. We saw the first three games of the World Series on the cruise ship, a series ultimately won by my Nats. We had many exotic dinners, and went on a walking tour of Nassau which unfortunately Mom and I had to cut short (on our end) because her electric wheelchair started running out of juice.
In 1993, I took a week off work after the semester ended, and decided to gas up my car, take my Rand McNally atlas with me, and head north. I told my parents and sister, with whom I was living at the time, that I planned to go to Wisconsin, and maybe Michigan if I wanted to. While staying at a motel in the Appleton area that first evening, I realized that the Canadian border was 6 hours away, at Sault Ste. Marie, and decided to go there instead. Upon arriving on the Michigan side, I was driving down a road with quite a few, ahem, budget motels, and saw one that looked okay, until I noticed that it was across the street from a place called the Horney Toad Lounge (see footnote). I later found a Super 8-ish motel in a better neighborhood, and the clerk replied, “Yeah, you don’t really want to stay across the street from the Horney Toad Lounge.”
Anyway, I dipped my toe into Canada, leaving the country for the first time in my life, and started heading back to Iowa. It may not be as flamboyant as what many of you have done, but it was memorable to me.
While I was still in the U.P., I marveled at the beautiful scenery and thought, “I could live here!” and then saw a sign near a ski resort that looked like a thermometer but instead registered the previous winter’s snowfall. SEVENTEEN FEET. No, thanks, I’ll stay in Iowa, at least for now. LOL
Footnote: Several years ago, I mined my memory bank and Googled the Horney Toad Lounge. I found out that it was a long-running venue for up and coming rock bands, kept alive because SSM is a college town, and the owner had died just a few years earlier, at a quite advanced age.
*We flew from Anchorage to Barter Island, AK to see polar bears.
*We flew by float plane to Katmai National Park to see grizzly bears and hiked down into the Valley of 10,000 Smokes.
*We drove both the Dalton Highway (Alaska) and the Dempster Highway (Canada) to their terminus on separate RV vacations.
*We went by ski plane to Winterlake Lodge on the Iditarod Trail. Drove snow machines, did some cross-country skiing, and did dogsled riding.
*By far the best vacations ever were the photo safaris we did in both Botswana and Tanzania
In the early 2000s my wife and I went to France for a couple of weeks and stayed for a few days in Provence, a few days in Burgundy, and a few days in Paris.
In Burgundy we stayed at a B & B owned by a retired Brit couple. We got along really well with them and partway into our visit they told us that they went back to the UK every Christmas. They then mentioned that they like to have someone stay there over Christmas and asked us if we would like to do that.
So, for two weeks over the Christmas holidays we stayed at their 700 year old house and it’s 300 year old new wing and all we had to do was feed the cats and make the place look occupied. They also has their own wine cellar and invited us to help ourselves. It was magic!
The mention of a French wine cellar scares me a little, because it reminds me of a night on our honeymoon that we wondered if we’d survive. We were driving through France, it was late, we were un petit peu lost, we weren’t going to make it to civilization by dark, so we ended up at a B&B…
… sort of. It was a castle with a wine cellar, and a photo of a palatial bedroom. We were lucky to find it, as there was nothing anywhere close by, but the owner was very welcoming… to his ruin of a castle. He admitted that he’d just started on renovations, and our room was one of the only rooms that had electricity or were even habitable.
So we were all alone in one little room of a huge castle.
Before the owner went… home? (to his own house? We weren’t sure…), he admitted that there was nothing to eat in the castle or anywhere nearby. BUT we should follow him.
He was not the type of person you would follow.
He led us away from the castle, down a path, to a bomb shelter door. Had us walk down a steep narrow stairway into the dark as he closed the door. He fumbled around and found a switch… we were in an extensive wine cellar! He poured us glasses of a couple of his favorite vintages… they weren’t drugged, we made it back to The Room as quickly as we politely could, and we split a sleeve of cookies that we’d picked up at a gas station a while before.
A nearly-abandoned castle makes a lot of unsettling noises during the night, so at first light, we jumped in the car, tore out of there and made it to Paris by noon. Ahhh, la normalcie!