Travel

Same-Sex Discount

We are standing in line at Westminster Abbey, waiting to pay the admission fee. Up ahead, the cashier is housed behind glass in the entry vestibule, which is a small area with a cold, stone floor. It’s chilly and damp outside and much the same inside; when we finally slip past the door and inside, it’s like walking into a refrigerator made of rocks. It’s £16 for an adult admission for me and my friend Beccy, and another £6 for each of the three children with us. In total, that’s £32 + £18, or £50. But then I notice an alternative: The family rate for 2 adults and one child is £32, plus £6 for each additional child. Or, in our case, £44, in total. That saves us £6 in admission—roughly $10 US. At the time of our trip (late winter of 2011) each US dollar is worth about half

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10 Things I Hate About You, Travel Edition

The flight from Boston to Los Angeles takes six hours, during which there is a kind of caricature of intimacy that develops, at least in Coach. You might not even know the name of the guy sitting at your elbow, but still: You know his choice of reading material; what he drinks with his meal; the way his face, erased of its wakeful composure, slackens when he nods off after lunch. Every once in a while, your thighs touch, or you get a whiff of his cologne, and it’s all at once completely normal and yet weird: Here we are, two people randomly seated together. We begin the journey as strangers and then, hours later, we part knowing more details about each other than many of our casual acquaintances—even if we haven’t exchanged a single word. We’re not friends, exactly, but we’re something. Six hours is a long time to

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Four Diary Entries

Barb Chamberlain is the Director of Communications and Public Affairs at Washington State University in Spokane. She was also the youngest Representative and (later) Senator elected to the Idaho State Legislature–which I didn’t know until she tagged me in a post she wrote on her blog: Five things you don’t know about me. But I’m glad I know now. In blog-speak, being “tagged” means that Barb challenged me to reveal five little-known things about myself, as well. I’ve done that before, with a giant dollop of discomfort. But since I’m a soft touch for people I like, I’m complying here. Well, sort of. Instead of giving you more little-known facts about me, I randomly opened my diary and transcribed a few entries.

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Summer on the Coast of Maine, Doggy-Style

I’m spending this week on the coast of southern Maine. If I had a choice, I’d spend most of the week as I am right now: in a low-slung beach chair, toes buried in the warm sand, and book propped open on my lap, pages ruffled by the strong wind off the water. Every few minutes I look up to inventory the surf, scanning for two heads—one belonging to my dark-haired daughter and the other her blond-haired friend—who are bobbing in the waves ahead of me. I have to squint hard to keep sight of them, in part because the sun is glaring, and in part because the tide is so low they seem a football field away. The girls appear as tiny figures, no bigger than lawn jockeys. The seagull stalking crabs a few yards in front of me seems as large as they are, as if this were

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A Retro Road Trip in a New World

When you’re from New England, the whole concept of taking a “Road Trip” means driving an hour to the beach. So when my friend Beccy suggested we take a road trip to Niagara Falls during our kids’ spring break, I mentally padded the usual duration with an extra hour or two and impetuously answered Yes. As I’ve established, I’m notoriously terrible with directions. I should have paused before answering. I should have considered that Beccy is from the Midwest, where folks will drive for two hours on a Sunday morning just to worship at church. She comes from a place where people traverse vast distances over flat earth to get almost anywhere. Or, nowhere: When my friend Jen was growing up in Nebraska, her parents routinely piled six kids into their Country Squire just to head out for a drive. So this is how I found myself, last week, journeying

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MarketingProfs in Santa Barbara: Show Notes, ‘Ann-otated’

00:00:01 My daughter Caroline. “I like the weather” (paraphrased) is kid-code for “Check it! I love being out of school!!” 00:00:18 Real drama unfolds as Sharon H. reveals that her work-BFF is actually… well… it’s not me. And it’s not Val, either, even though they live together. (Val: You might want to sleep with one eye open.) Behind her, Corey nods his head. Is he agreeable, or is it just easy to dance to? 00:00:40 I intimate what my real passion is. Is it blogging? Maybe. Or possibly it’s all that wine I’ve obviously had. My real passion becomes trying to stay upright. Meanwhile, Val is ready for her close-up, but soon gives up and joins Sharon E.’s mission to stay out of the frame entirely. 00:01:03 Penny is captured on camera saying with a smug dismissiveness: “You can’t blog? Well, can you type? [Then] You can blog.” Eavesdropping across

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Me and TomTom—True Love Always

Around Christmas, I met TomTom. We’ve been inseparable ever since. TomTom, if you don’t know, is a portable GPS navigation system. It mounts on the car dashboard, and its voice commands guide you to your destination. For someone like me—I get lost finding my way back to the table after a visit to the restaurant bathroom—it’s a godsend. Since we met, I’ve realized that he’s all that I’d ever want. And, as with any good relationship, he’s full of small surprises I didn’t even realize I’d want, but now find I can’t live without. What’s more, he’s opened up new horizons for me, encouraging me to venture into places I would have considered off limits before he was my companion. What’s all that if not the essence of a good relationship? Can you see why I love him? In fact, let me count the ways… Trust. TomTom gets me from

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‘Hey, Pretty Lady!’

A few weeks ago, I had some time to kill at Boston’s Logan Airport before a flight to Denver, and eventually to Santa Barbara. I’ve taken the same, lonely trip a dozen times or so, and it’s always a tiring day that reminds me again how profoundly disappointed I am that the seven-league boots I coveted as a kid still aren’t commercially produced. They would, after all, make travel so much more palatable. And quicker. Today was a quiet Tuesday in the terminal, and nothing there (a sundries shop, a TBCY staffed by a yawning clerk) seemed to hold much in the way of a half-hour’s distraction. But as I cased the concourse, the guy who operated the shoeshine stand caught my eye and called out to me, “Hey, Pretty Lady!” he said. “Look at those boots! You need shoe shine!” If you’ve been in a major municipal airport, in

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