traveling girl

(with apologies to GS for sort of stealing her title)

Ask me about my Thanksgiving plans. Go ahead, ask.

Since you're dying to know, I am going to Boston, to see my very own Blue Rose Girl. Hooray! I'm so 'cited!

Travel's a funny thing, you know. Time was, I hated it. Usually, it involved going to LA, which was fraught with angst for me in sort of lame and stupid ways. Plus - leaving the house? Sucks. But then I had to go away to get my Montessori training, and while that was long and hard (the away from home part, not the work part), it was something of a turning point.

The training center was in Westchester, and because the cafeteria of the college the Montessori folks use was closed on the weekends* I would hop the 4 o'clock train into NYC on Fridays, because a weekend without food is not for me. Note the casual way I throw that phrase around "I would hop the 4 o'clock train into NYC" - ha. It was initially nerve-wracking. But I had a friend who would meet me at Grand Central every Friday afternoon and she gave such clear and simple directions that it all turned out to be easy.

So I spent my weekends that summer in the city, after a lifetime of barely venturing outside my door. Being somewhere unfamiliar was terrifying to me. But this friend, she made sure I knew where I was, all the time. We'd come up out of the subway and she'd stop and grill me. "How would you get back to my house from here?" she'd say "Which train? Which stop?" And soon enough I felt like I could figure out how to get anywhere. She let me treat her home like my home (as did a couple other people that summer - the summer that was so hot one weekend all another friend and I could do was lie around in our underwear watching cooking shows until it got dark) and made sure I knew how to get there. It was almost like not leaving the house. But with better restaurants.

The other You'll Grow To Love Travel circumstance was having a long-distance girlfriend. I pretty much had to get over my dislike for travel if I wanted to "see" her, because she couldn't stay in one place for longer than a minute. (And then, when she did, she broke up with me.)

So here I am today, all excited about going to Boston. Somewhere I've never been! And I'm not freaking out! Just excited!

Okay, I am freaking out a little about driving to DC which I have to do in order to hook up with the girls who are taking me to Boston. Driving in unfamiliar places is the final frontier.



*Ok, so what the fuck was up with that? There were un-air conditioned, 3-story dorms full of sweaty Montessori teachers-to-be and there was no food on the weekends? Even though we had paid some ridiculous amount of money for the board part of room and board? And the cafeteria sucked anyway. Don't try and go live in a dorm for the first time at age 28, F yer I. Oh, and the lack of AC? Usually not a problem for me - I don't have it at home now - but we were on the 3rd floor of this building and it was fucking hot. That summer there was a heat wave and drought up and down the east coast - yeah, *that* summer - that's what I'm talking about here.