Adventure of the month

Back in January, I had a couple of days off in Buffalo. To be clear, I think we can all agree that there are at least two things horribly wrong with that last sentence. 1. Up until recently, Buffalo was not a place I'd choose to be under the best of circumstances. 2. Anytime that you combine Buffalo and the middle of winter, that is anything but the best of circumstance. Yet here I was. Trying to make lemonade out of bored and bitter lemons, I figured that I could go to Niagara Falls and get some of those cool frozen waterfall pics that pop up on all those nature sites. Or to rephrase, when faced with the dilemma of what to do in the Siberian hellscape that is western New York in January, my first instinct was to get the hell out, even if it was to a possibly colder place.

I knew approximately three things about Portland: 1. It is located somewhere in the Northwest. Ask me to differentiate it from Seattle on an unmarked map and I would have, at best, a 50% chance of getting right. 2. Based on reporting by famed documentarian, Fred Armisen, it is a designated hipster preserve. 3. A new friend, who is earning cool points by the bucketful, has spent a lot of time there. As a result of this, he send me off armed with what some would call an exhaustive list of recommendations. Now here's one thing I did not know: 1. How cold it could get. By conflating it with Seattle, I pictured gray, rainy days but nothing that would require serious layering. I was oh so very wrong.

For the past six years, figuring out New Year's Eve plans has been pretty simple. Seeing as I live in a mid-rise in the middle of downtown Miami with a view to most of the area's firework displays, it was a given that the party would be at my place. It's always worked out wonderfully. We don't have to pay exorbitant cover charges. I got to play hostess, which I love, and my friends always had a place to crash once the party was over. Problem is, after my latest run-in with the evil that is mold, my apt is a demolition zone and not in the cool fashion-shoot kind of way. It's an uncomfortable mess and definitely not suitable for entertaining, no matter how much champagne we pour into little plastic flutes. Therefore, we were in need of a plan B.  This where my friends, Ivon and Sylvia came up with an always wonderful idea. A road trip. We would move this shindig to St Augustine.

When you take the speed dating approach to travel, you can't allow yourself to get too bogged down in the details. Take for example, my latest adventure. I landed in Vientiane at midnight and had an entire twelve hours before I had to catch a flight to Guam. The sensible thing to do would have been to get some sleep, maybe a quick breakfast and start the new day refreshed (or as close to it as possible when whizzing through time zones). Problem is Vientiane is the capital of Laos, a new country for me and I was determined to see... something, which is more or less how I phrased it when I checked into my hotel at 1am.  I explained to the front desk clerk that I wanted to set up a driver to show me the sights. When asked what precisely I wanted to see, my response was "Uh, I don't know. Anything specific to Laos. Temples, maybe. That monument that shows up in all the Google searches. Anything interesting. No shopping."

I feel like so many of my blog posts begin in one of two ways. Either there is somewhere I've always wanted to go to and Woo-Hoo, I finally did it. Or I kind of stumbled into something not knowing what to expect and found it to be way cooler than anticipated. Then we have my latest adventure, which is a combination of the two. Anyone who knows me is aware of my love of all things Halloween. I begin preparing my costumes months in advance and insist on dressing up, no matter where I am. This can result in some awkward situations, such as the time I was the only person in all of Leipzig, Germany dressed up for the occasion (as a Gothic Barbie Doll no less) but I don't care. It is a holiday dedicated to fun and candy and I am on board 100%. Lately, there feels like there has been a conflation of Halloween and Mexico's Day of the Dead celebration. Both fall roughly around the same time, involve costumes and prominently feature skulls and other "spooky" symbols. Al...

October was coming to an end and with it, so was my four month workation in Rotterdam. With just one break and diminishing funds remaining, I left the final destination up to chance. Whatever flight was cheapest on my days off, that's where I was going. A couple of searches via cheapoair, skyscanner, momondo and finally Kayak later, fate determined that I was going to Bergerac, France. With that decided, I had a new, more pressing question. What was I going to do in Bergerac for five days? The town is best known for two things: wine and a large-schnozzed romantic. I like wine. I vaguely remember Steve Martin playing this guy, Cyrano de Bergerac in a movie a million years but nothing about this combo sounded interesting enough for five days.  I expanded my search a bit and saw that Bordeaux was less than a two hour train ride away. C'est le done. This was going to be a wing it (and wine it) kinda trip.

1. The architecture. A beguiling mix of Moorish and Gothic, it gives the city a wonderfully mysterious air and encourages the visitor to walk around taking it all in even if the temperature is slightly less than that of the sun. Without question, the most recognizable building is the Seu Cathedral, sitting on the water's edge. Built upon the site of a Moorish mosque, it was first consecrated in 1230 but was not completed until 1601. After an earthquake in 1851 destroyed a portion of the cathedral, Antonin Gaudi was brought in for the redo to work mainly on the interior portion. After a couple of years, he got into a fight with the contractor and did his best 'take this job and shove it'.