Vacationing even further from home

 We went to Mexico last week, a long-awaited family gathering that has been buoying me through the dark wet fall. (Somebody once described planned vacations to me as "the islands you swim towards" in life, which feels apt.)

With the covid variant surge welling up around us, we considered cancelling, but the prospect of endless variant surges ahead (and the wreckage of multiple cancelled trips already behind us) plus the yearning for sunshine made us go forward. This was a little reckless and irresponsible, but we did it anyway. 

There were functionally two parts of our vacation: 1) Travel Nightmare and 2) Vacation Bliss. 

Phase one kicked off with a very early trip to the airport, only to discover our flight to LAX was delayed 2.5 hours due to "staffing shortage." This necessitated rebooking of the connecting flight to Puerto Vallarta for an evening flight. We were annoyed, but we seized the opportunity of a long LAX layover to visit family, which was a lovely little gift. After that, though, the whole thing just fell apart. The evening flight was delayed and then cancelled completely, and we were rebooked for a flight BACK TO PORTLAND the following day and THEN a flight to Puerto Vallarta from Portland the day AFTER THAT. We lost two full days of our vacation and spent those days in airports and airplanes. It was maddening and Kafkaesque (we spent one night in an airport hotel in Portland, which was somehow much more frustrating than if we had been in basically any other city), and apparently Alaska Airlines technically owes us nothing for having functionally stolen two days of our lives. (And if you want to send me off on a ranting monologue, ask me how I feel about the "meal vouchers" they give you in the airport.)

But we finally reached phase two and staggered into Sayulita in the evening, two and a half days after we started the journey. Everybody was already there waiting, and the place we booked was decadently lovely. I don't have much to say about it except that it was all the sun-washed lounging interspersed with ocean swimming and chats with family that I could possibly have wished for. And I saw a LOT of humpback whales, to my great joy. And we all tested negative for covid at the end of the trip, so my fear that one or more of us might be stuck in Mexico for weeks did not play out. 

We came home on Christmas Day, and had our own celebration on the following day. And now it's time for real life.

Vacationing far from home

 We did it! We left the Pacific Northwest!

Day One: Flying For A Very Long Time. Flight was fine, transit was a struggle, but we finally made it to the hotel in the evening, and sallied out into Midtown Manhattan. 

Day Two: A View, and a Lot of Walking. We ate Bagel #1, went to the Top of the Rock to see the view, and made a loop of St. Patrick's, Grand Central, and the public library. (The public library! And there was an awesome exhibit!) We rounded off the day with a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the girls spend a weirdly long time looking at armor.

Day Three: Boats, Immigration, and George Washington. We did a classic tourist trip to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, and then visited the Fraunces Tavern to think about George Washington. (Skipper, who had finished an 800-page biography of George Washington just in time, regaled us with oddball factoids.) We spent the evening in Jersey City with family, and Skipper resolved to start that author's biography of Alexander Hamilton. 

Day Four: The Future, Central Park, and Moving to Chelsea. Duchess and Cook went uptown to tour a college that Duchess is interested in, and Skipper and I went uptown to stand in a really long line to get a really good bagel. This bagel, Bagel #2, was the best of our trip and possibly my life. We met up at Central Park for some wandering, and it turns out that Central Park is very lovely. We went to Chelsea to check into our vacation rental, and spent the evening enjoying having separate rooms with doors. Three days in a single hotel room is a lot. We also bought the Alexander Hamilton biography. 

Day Five: East Village. We ate Bagel #3, visited Washington Square Park, Union Square Park, Tompkins Square Park, and a lot of things between, including the Strand Bookstore and a stop to try Bagel #4 (my second favorite of the trip). We ate some kind of delicious stuffed flatbread. 

Day Six: High Line and Then Culture. We spent the morning on the High Line, which is beautiful and incredibly good civic infrastructure. We visited Little Island, which is just fun, and then hustled back uptown to drop the girls off at Hadestown (birthday present for Duchess, who loves Broadway). Cook and I went to MOMA, where we discovered a mutual fondness for the kind of art that involves big blocks of color. We wrapped up the day with ramen.

Day Seven: Thanksgiving, I Guess, and Brooklyn, and a Long Trip Home. It made our plane tickets substantially cheaper to fly home on Thanksgiving day, so we spent one last day in New York before our 8pm flight home.  We ate Bagel #5 (it was okay), crossed the bridge, walked along the Heights and then across the Squibb Bridge to the waterfront, all of which was lovely. We went to a bakery and then made one last long walk back to the luggage storage place to soak up just a little more New York ambiance. And then we came home, to pick up our real life again!

It was a great trip, really dense with experiences and carbohydrates, and if I ever go back to New York City, I will know exactly where to go for my bagels.