My husband and I have a dream of living abroad.  We’d love to take the kids and move from one country to another, settling for a time being in each, getting jobs, learning the culture, the ways of that world, knowing the people, and eating the food.  Whether we ever will, remains a mystery to us.  In the meantime, we’re happy to read about other families braver than we are.  Families such as the one belonging to Rebecca Ramsey, author of French by Heart.  I marvel at her courage to uproot her three small children from their South Carolina home and follow her husband to France for four years.

Rebecca is as charming and as hilarious in real life as she is in her book.  I’ve read French by Heart twice, I love it so, and I also bought an extra copy because I wanted to give it to someone to enjoy it just as much as I did.  Please visit her blog: #mce_temp_url# to read more about her, and also go on and purchase a copy of French by Heart.  #mce_temp_url# has some amazing deals (don’t they always?)!

The contest for this book is through next Sunday at noon (my time).  Everyone who leaves a comment on any of the posts is automatically entered.  Have fun!

Congratulations to Corinne of #mce_temp_url# for winning last week’s Writing Home giveaway!  Stop on by her place and say hello.  She is a wonderful writer.

I spent a quarter of my waking hours in Kauai chasing roosters, just so I could snap a picture of them. They run rampant all over the island, crowing at all hours of the day and night, their internal clocks haywire.  For all their cheeky behavior, they are quite shy, or maybe just terrified of the high pitched squeals of the children chasing them, yet I did get them in the end.

This trip to Hawaii was for my baby sister’s wedding.  She is unbelievably beautiful to begin with, so you can be sure she made a stunning bride.  The wedding was on the beach, as all weddings in Hawaii ought to be.  We were walking around barefoot, digging our toes in the golden sand, laughing and crying, and hugging each other.  My daughter and my niece had the time of their lives being flower girls.  I watched them remembering how I used to wish I had been a flower girl as a child.

I missed my blogging pals and can’t wait to catch up with all of you!  The internet connection was terrible, though.  Which isn’t all that bad, I suppose, as I had ample opportunities to watch the violet tinted sunrise on my early morning walks through the enchanted forest, coffee in hand.

The bright, cloudless days, I dozed away on the beach, smeared in a tick layer of sunblock, yet still somehow managing to get a burn, while the kids played in the sand and the water.  As the sun set and the skies quickly darkened, we gathered around an outside table and had dinner and conversation by flickering firelight in torches and candles, dreading our return to the cold, damp Northwest.  Still, we are highly grateful for a chance to warm up our bones, and the lovely reminder that summer is coming.

A lovely, blessed week to all of you!

After an early, misty morning trek to our favorite boulangerie for croissants and coffee, we decided that the best way to spend the weekend was at the beach. Hubby and I have very opposing views of what constitutes a perfect day at the beach. I tend to be drawn to gloomy, stormy weather, relentless crashing waves and pelting rain. After an invigorating, brisk walk on the water’s edge, I look forward to the coziness of the beach cabin, with its crackling fire, mugs of hot coffee and cocoa, countless board games, and hours of staring at the incessant waves from the comfort of my wing chair, open book ignored in my lap.

Hubby, on the other hand, wants meltingly hot days where he can spread out his blanket and doze off to the lively chatter of kids playing in the sand and seagulls calling to each other overhead. Later on, he wants to fly the kite with the kids, go in search of dripping ice cream cones, have a game of beach volleyball and go surfing.

Because we know a happy marriage takes a lot of work and compromise, he’s willing to accept stormy evenings, and I suppose I’m willing to have a couple scorching hours late morning.

When we arrived at the beach, there wasn’t a cloud to be seen directly overhead, although the horizon was a steely gray. We both smiled uneasily at each other, he most likely wondering how soon the rain would fall, I, worrying that they would dissipate before the wind would blow them our way. No sooner did we lay our blanket down, than the northwest wind began to roll in off the ocean, cooling the air immensely and sweeping sand across our blanket. As the clouds were still a distance away, the azure of the sky lingered on.

Unmindful of the change in weather, the kids continued their play and proceeded with plans for the sand castle. Hubby donned his sweatshirt and went for a nap; I opened my book and started daydreaming. In another couple weeks school would start, and shortly thereafter the preparations for the holidays.

And then the rain came. First one plop and then another. The mountain whose road we had meandered on, had donned a cap of foggy gray descending in waves, it seemed, down the side. We quickly sought shelter and listened from our cozy spots at the rain tap tapping on the window panes, snuggling deeper within our blankets, and sipping our hot drinks, content for the moment, to watch the summer storm push through.

Years ago, a friend and I took a few sunny summer days to explore the Pacific Northwest coast. Our main goal was to stay off the beaten path and experience life at a slower pace. Antique shops, flea markets, and art galleries were our destination, as were berry farms, deserted beaches, dusty book shops and coffee houses. We had reserved a couple of nights at bed and breakfast places along the way, provisioned ourselves with a picnic basket overflowing with Belgian chocolates, crusty bread, and the best cheeses we could afford, and set out.

She was to be married that summer, and soon after to move away. I suppose, in a way, we were gifting each other a last memory of our girlhood. Ours was a friendship that had carried us from childhood, through the turbulent, self-conscious adolescence, and into our twenties.

The views were stunning. Rolling pastoral beauty giving way to dense emerald forests. We followed a river that shined like mica and came into a village right out of a nautical painting. The sun was setting, all rose and apricot colored over the bay. We parked our car and strolled the heart of the main street in search of a coffee house. With steaming drinks and chunks of cheese filled bread, we made our way to the beach, content to sit on the sand and soak up the beauty before us.

As darkness was approaching, we didn’t linger too long. Somewhere along those dusty roads, the hostess of a white Victorian house was awaiting our arrival, probably eager to lock up and go to bed. Our bedroom, at the top of three flights of stairs, was under the eaves and decorated with a large-scale lilac print wallpaper right out of a Victoria magazine. The brass, queen-sized bed was piled up with fluffy pillows, and in the bathroom a claw-foot tub occupied most of the space. We loved it.

A misty morning arrived too soon. We took our time over breakfast in the ornate dining room, both decided that the food could be better, yet stuffed ourselves nonetheless, and set off for a day of treasure hunting. It seemed that time stood still. The clouds and morning drizzle cleared away, and our minds emptied of everything but the joy of each other’s company.

That night’s bed and breakfast was a far cry from the first. We took one look at it and turned our car around. It was spooky! Our overactive imaginations had us roaming the dark roads in search of acceptable lodging. Finally, after it seemed as though we drove for hours, we found a newly built hotel, devoid of character, as expected, but with views of the silver ocean lapping at the rocks below.

Before we headed home the following afternoon, we stopped into a local bookshop and sealed our three days together by each purchasing a copy of Jane Eyre. It was a favorite book to both of us, and a talisman to remember our friendship and our last adventure before matrimony.

my three most favorite people - vienna, austria

medieval fortress - romania

I have been dreaming of a vacation the last several days.  The kind where for three weeks the only work required of me is making peace between my kids.  And it needs to be somewhere across either the Atlantic or the Pacific, or south of Costa Rica.  However, I do not think that will happen this summer.  I already have all the glorious days of heat and sunshine scheduled out for work.  Scattered here and there will be a few camping trips, a weekend at the beach, a week in San Diego and a long weekend north to Seattle, or possibly Canada.  It will be lovely and relaxing, to be sure, but not the vacation that I crave.

prague

I have been writing a lot lately on vacation destinations: recommending places for families with children, planning weeklong itineraries that balance fun with relaxation and learning, and offering suggestions on coping with differences in languages and cultures, while trying to feed cranky, famished kids.  Oh, how I want my family to be following at least one of those itineraries.  A complete immersion in another culture, the texture of life all around, waiting to be explored, creating unforgettable experiences with our children.  If there’s a better way to spend a summer, I really have no interest in finding out.   

However, I’ve realized that I need to do that here at home.  I’ve lived in this state for twenty years and I still haven’t gone down to Ashland.  I’ve determined that this summer we will investigate all our city and state have to offer.  We will visit museums, parks, sights, churches, markets, beaches, mountains, vineyards.  And we will pretend we are tourists, armed with cameras and information to educate ourselves, we’ll take a brake to spread a blanket underneath a willow on some riverbank and have a picnic and a nap before going on.  The more I think about it, the better it sounds. 

We will pick a day or two at a time and go.  After all, traveling in the company of my loved ones is what it’s all about.

Our last visit to Sighisoara was in sunny July of 2006.  It was a few weeks shy of the annual art festival, yet the interior courtyard of this medieval walled city with its secret passageways and lookout towers was bursting at its decaying seams with tourists.  We hadn’t made any reservations as my hubby, in charge of making lodging arrangements, had assured me that we’d have no difficulty getting a room at one of the city’s many inns (he had been there just weeks before and hadn’t encountered any problem).  As we drove through the hilltop citadel’s gates, a growing sense of apprehension gripped me as I observed the narrow alley streets packed with parked cars.

We had been driving all day, our baby daughter fussing as the hot wind whipped through the open windows of the non air-conditioned car, possibly disturbing her sensitive ears.  Our son wanted to get out and run, as evidenced through his relentless kicking of my seat, and I just wanted assurance that we wouldn’t spend the night in the automobile.  We tried one inn and then another, and nothing. We made our way down the list, but there wasn’t even the smallest room available. Although I can’t remember now, I’m sure I let my husband know my of my displeasure with the situation.  

We had parked and walked along hoping to find a local willing to let a room out to a family of four that included a cranky baby and a six year old boy full of energy.  Not an easy task.  It is nerve wracking for both the homeowner and the paying occupants as the best rooms are usually presented, rooms filled to capacity with sentimental ornamentation of the fragile variety.  Luckily, we didn’t venture too long.  An elderly lady figured out right away what we were in need of and offered to take us to a someone who was in need of making some quick cash.  

Just a block away from the main square, she said, and beckoned us to follow her as she hurried along the cobblestone street and turned left unto another.  The house was out of a storybook, a pretty pastel blue, with red geraniums spilling from the window boxes and a red arched door leading into a courtyard filled with fragrant rose bushes in every shade of crimson.  Although the owners didn’t know we were coming, they didn’t seem surprised to see us, and once we had paid, ushered us in, exclaiming over how beautiful our children were.  They were an elder couple and much to the delight of our boy, they had two kittens.

After letting our son play with the kittens for a while, and making small talk with the gentleman (his wife was in the next room making the bed up in her best, embroidered linen, no doubt), we left for the main square and its restaurants.  I was ready for a real dinner.  I wanted traditional and comforting, despite the heat, maybe sauerkraut with homemade sausage or schnitzel, and homemade bread.  We weren’t disappointed.  The food was sublime (and very fattening, I’m sure).  We sat back and chatted with the people at the table next to us.  They were visiting from England and they were on their way to the little village of Viscri, looking to buy a house to restore in that newly abandoned Saxon hamlet.

(Apparently, the Saxon population of Romania is on the decline.  Out of thousands, only a handful remain, and their houses stand silent and empty, slowly deteriorating.  With the newly opened gates to the West in the early ’90’s, the Saxons, who had been in the Transylvanian region of Romania since the 1100’s, fled for a better life in the country from which their ancestors originated.  With time, and due to a difficulty integrating themselves in a culture they were unaccustomed to, some returned and, to make a long story short, set up a trust -The Mihai Eminescu Trust whose primary benefactor is Prince Charles (he has bought a house in Viscri as well and has since restored it)- to restore ancient Saxon houses in the Saxon villages by using traditional methods of restoration in keeping with the timeframe the structures were built in.)

As darkness fell and we made our way through the dimly lit, yet still busy market square and back to our lodging, we discussed how traveling makes strangers so willing to share personal information they wouldn’t imagine to otherwise, as though there’s a need to create a favorable impression for the recipient’s future memories.

Back in our pastel colored shelter we sat awhile and listened to our hosts lamenting their diminishing health and The Mihai Eminescu Trust (MET) for not approving a major entertaining park to be built on the outer outskirts of the town.  We nodded our heads and empathized over their health concerns, but, seeing how hospitable they had been, didn’t acknowledge that we were on the side of the MET .

As they retreated to their summer kitchen out in the courtyard (where they had two twin beds), insisting that they wanted us to have the freedom and comfort of their entire house for the night, we tucked the kids in and opening the widow set in a wall two feet thick we listened to the crickets and to the distant sound of merrymakers and we were, as Andre Dubus says in one of his short stories, “seeing something in our mind’s eye that was nowhere in the room,” the bygone days those same walls we were gazing at had seen.

Ever since I have read Prague, a novel by Arthur Phillips, I have wanted to visit Budapest.  Prague is the story of five American expats who settle in post communist Budapest in the early 1990’s for business and romantic opportunities.  Most of their time is spent entertaining obscure suspicions that their fellow expats in Prague are faring much better than they are.  The novel is thin on plot (I like a story with a beginning, middle, and end), and thick on character development (which has its own time and place), yet it offers some breathtaking descriptions of sights around the baroque, hillier Buda, where the National Palace is located, and Pest, the downtown, which abounds in grand 19th century architecture.

I can’t say I enjoyed the characters as much as I enjoyed reading about the city they were in.  Or, I should say, as much as I dreamed about visiting the city of Budapest.  My mom had visited while a newlywed and she told me all about the restaurants and the museums and the palatial residences on leaf-shaded streets.  Family and friends filled in with descriptions of the famous, mosaic tiled public baths, the Buda Castle, Andrassy Avenue, and the numerous antique stores and clothing boutiques.  I love castles, architecture, antiques, history.  And I love to eat good food.  It wasn’t a question of whether or not to go, it was merely a question of when.

So, two years ago, armed with diapers and enough formula to feed my five month old for 30 days, we set off.  Our goal was to see as much as we could of eastern and central europe as our 6 year old and 5 month old would allow.  Surprisingly  (although we were rushed and needed to take into account nap times and snack times and all the etc. pertaining to kids), we were able to accomplish a lot and both of them were little angels… most of the time.

We left Budapest as our last city to explore.  We had flown in to Budapest and we were to fly out of it to come back home.  What we forgot to take into consideration those last few days (and we should have been experts at it by then), was to look at a calendar.  Traveling with two kids, it’s best to avoid visiting a city in the middle of a festival or a national holiday.  And that’s exactly what we did.

We were stuck in traffic for hours.  Our car overheated and began to steam and there we were in the middle of the city with no place to pull over, but the grassy park divider.  We didn’t speak but a smattering of unrecognizable Hungarian, and based on the people we had met thus far on our cross country trip, hardly anyone spoke English.  Someone kind enough jumped out of their car and handed us a big bottle of water.  We popped the hood and waited.  We gathered it was some kind of celebration.  It was stifling, people were loud, through open car windows techno music was blaring; in a bus that passed us by, two teens were fighting, and no one wanted to have anything to do with it, even when they pushed each other violently. Gradually it got dark and the fireworks started.  Or what we assumed were fireworks.  As it was we couldn’t see much, too many tall buildings in the way.  Then, with the car sufficiently cooled (we hoped), we pulled back into the traffic, and not a minute too soon, as a strong gust of wind, deafening thunder, and forceful rain came pouring down.  A huge branch snapped off a tree, and the street was rapidly flooding.  Never in my life have I experienced or thought possible anything like that.  The clouds burst like a water ballon.  The windshield wipers barely kept up.  Somehow we made a u-turn and climbed on to higher ground.  The streets below us were flooded, plastic bags and tree branches were floating on the river that had previously been a street.

The next morning we left.  We had heard that some boats had capsized on the Danube, where thousands had been out celebrating and watching the Independence Day fireworks.  People had died.  It was scary and sad and unpredictable.  It made me think of how one moment you’re full of life, pulsating with it, and then in a flash it’s gone, almost as it never was.  But, I’m getting too morbid here.

The romance of Budapest is still awaiting me.  Next time I’m going it will be early in the fall; I’ll have checked the calendar beforehand.