Phil shows us how it’s done.

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Remember episode of The Simpsons where Marge decides to take a vacation by herself and ends up at Rancho Relaxo?

Most of you are probably nodding enthusiastically. Others might have vague recollections of it. And a select few might be shaking your heads and saying, “I’ve never really watched The Simpsons.”

That latter group, of course, belongs under glass, so we can inspect and examine them, because they are the modern day equivalent of children being raised by wolves. I mean, we’ve heard rumors of it happening, we suspected it was possible, but … really? Never seen The Simpsons? I … I just can’t right now. It’s too early.

The rest of you, who grew up on the show as I did, probably find yourself quoting it on a near-daily basis.  While my recollection of high school math is virtually non-existent, and I’m hopeless at reciting anything beautiful or poetic (with a few rare exceptions), I find that I can often regurgitate huge portions of Simpsons episodes without hesitation.

This is not something to be proud of, I know. But neither is being able to eat an entire sheet cake in one sitting, and look how I brag about that.

Rancho Relaxo came to mind over and over again at the Kloof. Because even between the morning hikes and the afternoon teas and the evening drives, we still had plenty of free time to while away in whatever manner we pleased.

In the words of the great Troy McClure:

By now, you’ve seen all Rancho Relaxo has to offer… But remember: we can’t tell you how to have a good time. You have to tell us! As I said to Dolores Montenegro in Calling All Quakers: Have it your way, baby!

And goodness, at the Kloof, we did precisely that.

One afternoon, we tried our hands at archery. ARCHERY. Needless to say, I didn’t have the sort of upbringing where archery was an option. Someone wisely realized it was best not to hand us weapons as kids, lest we go completely Lord of the Flies.

I wasn’t terribly good at the whole arrow shooting thing, but the nice thing about archery is that you don’t need to be proficient (or even come close to hitting the target) to look sexy as hell. No wonder Katniss and Legolas got so much tail (my nerd friend would like me to note that Legolas doesn’t actually get any tail in the books, but it’s pretty obvious that he’s supposed to).

This is a really, REALLY easy way to get laid, folks. Just saying.

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Seriously. I wish I had known about this in college.

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Rand gave it a shot (heh). At the beginning, he was rather terrible, but that didn’t detract from the aforementioned sexiness of the whole thing:

Mee-YOW.

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And then he did this:

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That’s right: THE GOOBER GOT A HOLE-IN-ONE OR WHATEVER.

Some days were spent entirely in the pool or at the spa. I have no photographic evidence of the latter (because I cannot take a camera into a spa, people. Besides, there was nakedness involved and we all know my blog isn’t that interesting), but it was basically the best thing on the entire planet, and I am pleased to say that my otherwise totally manly husband is now obsessed with hot stone massages and steaming open his pores.

Looking back, it’s amazing that we had the freedom that we did, and that no one got hurt or deported.

Phil got to try his hand at the espresso machine:

Internet, meet Phil. You guys are going to be great friends. I just KNOW it.

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With some pretty darn good results:

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There was hiking, which we could do with a guide, or on our own (wisely, we took a guide, because the only way the path was marked was with these little rock piles that we’d easily have missed).

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And then there were all the times that Rand decided he wanted to try sneaking up on the animals (I married a nine-year-old. He’s just tall for his age.)

“I’m gonna hug him and squeeze him and love him and name him George.”

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This is a photo he managed to get of some of the bontebok. As you can see, they are well aware of his presence.

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And the day that we went canoeing, and poor Justin got stuck with me:

Photo courtesy of Justin, who probably deserves more courtesy than this.

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That’s how it went, every single wonderful day at the Kloof. I can’t wait to go back again, this time with a slightly different agenda: I want to sit around and, in the words of my friend Pam, do a little bit more of nothing.

That’s probably the only thing at the Kloof we didn’t try, but I’m sure even that would have been wonderful.

So if something major happened in the last five days, the Geraldine of last Sunday (who is currently writing this post) doesn’t know about it yet. Hopefully, nothing I say will be too offensive in the context of recent events, which I presently know nothing about.

But just to be on the safe side, here’s template. Please fill it in accordingly:

I feel very __________ about _____________.

And with that, here are the links:

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A single mom explains why we all need to stop lying in our Facebook posts.

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I may be totally biased, but I highly recommend that you donate to the Veronica Mars Movie Kickstarter.

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NPR explains that the first encounter between humans and neanderthals went, well … let’s just say better than expected.

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A young boy greets the Duchess of Cambridge, and unabashedly picks out a present for her.

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Serial entrepreneur Graham Hill writes about how living a life unencumbered by stuff gives him a lot of joy, and a lot less stress. It’s the perfect read to inspire your spring cleaning. And it’s a great reminder that if you not only have stuff, but actually have too much of it? Then you are ridiculously fortunate.

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I recently made Smitten Kitchen’s white chocolate salted oatmeal cookies. Here’s the thing: I don’t like oatmeal cookies. Or white chocolate. So please don’t take it lightly when I tell you: these suckers are friggin magical.

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It’s a Boston terrier … dressed up as Leeloo from The Fifth Element.

This “Follow the Frog” PSA, created by the Rainforest Alliance, is a great example of content marketing done right. And holy crap, is it entertaining.

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I’ve heard the story of teen activist Malala Yousafzai before, but for some reason, I found this comic of her assassination attempt to be more powerful than many of the other stories I’d seen about it.

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The clothing of the Herero tribe in Southern Africa is colorful, eclectic, and all together engrossing.

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This video, of 6-year old breakdancing phenom B-girl Terra, will make your jaw drop. It certainly did mine.

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That’s it for me this week! Or that was it for me last week … or … Ack. Nevermind. Enjoy the weekend, folks.

Apparently, I used to be camera-shy.

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No, like, really camera shy:

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And my face looks much fuller then that it does now. It had that roundness of youth that slowly migrates out of your face and moves down to your ass as you get older.

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And his beard was less gray …

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And goodness, his hair.

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And yet other things seem remarkably unchanged by time. Like our tendency to order multiple desserts. We had that even then.

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Or the achieving of transcendence over a cup of gelato.

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My inclination towards earrings the size of salad plates continues, even today.

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And then there’s all this nonsense:

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Which seems to show no signs of stopping.

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Oh, well. I’m sure we’ll come to our senses of one these decades.

“But Geraldine,” you cry, “I’ve read all of your archives numerous times! I’ve memorized everything you’ve ever written.” And in reply I will simply smile and ride off on a winged pony.

Yeah, I know. I don’t have a winged pony. But no one’s read all my archives, either.

Anyway, please enjoy. I’ll be back tomorrow with an all new round-up, and reflections on the year that was. After that I’ll be offline until January 2nd, working on a secret project codenamed “Eating Cookies.” (Spoiler: the project consists mostly of eating cookies. Also, drinking milk.)

• On a freezing cold night last December, Rand and I strolled through Chicago’s Millennium Park.
• While visiting my aunt and uncle for the holidays, I decide to clean out their medicine cabinet. Two words: Corn Salve.
• Twilight board games, drunk dancing, and the magic of last Christmas.
• In case you needed definitive proof that my family is crazier than yours.
• 10 photos from Seattle’s 2010 SnOMG snow storm (yes, we called it that. Forgive us.)
• I found last year’s holiday decorations in San Francisco’s Union Square to be baffling, at best.

But none of this changes the fact Threadless has some absolutely adorable t-shirts out there. And since they’re now not as en vogue as they were, say, 4 or 5 years ago, it is now officially cool to wear their clothing again. Hell, one could probably get away with wearing their tees even if she’s pushing 30 … or pulling 25, as it were.

So even those these aren’t technically travel items, they are tangentially related to travel. And let’s face it: so is my blog.

I particularly love the design that won their Threadless Loves Travel II design competition. It’s entitled Globetrotter, and it features a woman riding a HORSE THAT’S ACTUALLY A GLOBE.

As the kids would say, “ZOMG”. Which, I believe, is an expression of excitement. Either that, I just proposed to you in Klingon.

Oh, and then there’s this:

If there is a god (and if there is one, I’m pretty sure he lives in Italy), I would already own this. Hell, everyone in Italy should own this shirt.

Sigh. I miss John Paul.

Yeah. Well, maybe not everyone. But still, it’s cute.

“This place is a shithole,” were the first words out of my mouth.

“I know!” he replied happily. “Isn’t it great?”

And I suppose for him, it really was. He was away from home for the first time, living in L.A., and trying, truly trying, to become a movie star.

I suppose that last bit is still true for him and most people who move to Los Angeles. And while there’s something quietly sobering about a town of aspiring something-or-others and the realization that it just can’t happen for all of them, there’s something weirdly hopeful about it, too. A whole town full of starry-eyed dreamers and the idea that maybe, just maybe, one of them will make it.

Strangely enough, it almost leaves me feeling … left out. L.A. isn’t my world. I see movies weeks after they come out, or not at all. I don’t understand the cultural relevance of Kim Kardashian, nor do I care to. And when I think, I could have done a better job than she did in that movie, it serves more to illustrate how bad or miscast an actress was, rather than belie any hidden desire to be a movie star or make out with Robert Downey, Jr.

Okay, fine. There’s one line in that previous paragraph that’s an outright lie. You find it.

The point is, L.A. is a strange and foreign place to me. While waiting for a valet to grab our car outside a sushi restaurant near Beverly Hills, we overheard some woman’s phone conversation. It was, as far as we could tell, all about Michael Cera. She said his name, I kid you not, at least a dozen times in the two minutes we were there. And it was at that moment that I realized: she wanted us to overhear. A few times, she was actually looking directly at is, blathering on and on about Michael Cera. After a while, the name ceased to even make sense – it was just noise.

“Michael Cera Michael Cera My Kull Sare Uh My Kull Sare Uh.”

As Rand noted, in L.A., it’s all about who you know. And the woman outside the sushi shop apparently knew Michael Cera. Or, at least, she wanted us to think she did.

I desperately wanted to explain to her that a show wasn’t necessary: we’re from Seattle.  Our cult of celebrity died with Kurt, god rest his troubled soul. Our billionaires look like paupers.  One time, I saw Dave Matthews at the QFC in Wallingford, and my first thought was, “Why do I recognize that homeless man?”

Of course, I nevertheless took this photo of a man we saw driving alongside us on the highway towards Los Angeles. At the time, I thought it was Wayne Knight, a.k.a. … Newman.

He's clearly talking to someone. I suspect he's saying, "... Jerry."

Now I think it’s just a fat dude with glasses. But then again, so is Wayne Knight.

I guess in L.A., you never know when you might be driving alongside a movie-star, or when the girl who starred in a crappy horror movie with you turns out to be Leighton Meester. That’s the world in which my brother lives. A world in which, on a good day, you’re devoured by aliens, and paid for your troubles:

My brother, right before he gets eaten. He dies or is otherwise put out of comission in most of his movies.

I wish him luck in his endeavors, since I’m fairly sure luck is most of what it takes to be famous. He’s moving back to L.A. at the end of the month, after a long hiatus in Hong Kong with his wife, during which he tried his hand at the theater scene, and had to remember lines in both English and Cantonese.

I hope, for his sake, all of it’s worth it.  That he still finds L.A. as great and full of promise as he once did. And who knows? Maybe one day some girl will be standing outside a sushi restaurant, blah-blah-blahing on her cell phone about Edward DeRuiter so many times that anyone within ear-shot will want to slap her.

One can only hope.

A while later, she was knitting quietly when the flight attendant saw her and said, “Oh! You found your needle.”

The woman explained that yes, she had accidentally dropped it and she found it again. Not the flight crew.

“We went through a lot of trash looking for that,” the attendant said, sounding almost hurt.

“Oh yeah,” said the woman, dismissively, as she continued on with her knitting. “Thanks for that.”

What. The. Fizz.

Just so we’re clear, knitting needles are easy to come by. Knitters have them by the dozens. They’re mass-produced and generally affordable, since people often lose them. And not only did this woman blame the crew for something she herself had lost, she made them go through piles and piles of trash (having accused them of throwing it out), and then didn’t bother to tell them when she actually did find her needle. Which clearly wasn’t that important to her, anyway, because she spent the last half of the flight sleeping, and not knitting.

So while I really, really didn’t think it necessary to point this out, it seems kind of important to say in the wake of this event. Ahem – IF YOU LOSE SOMETHING WITH ZERO MONETARY OR SENTIMENTAL VALUE ON A PLANE, TRY NOT TO BE A TOTAL ASSHOLE ABOUT IT. I watched the whole scene in shock, and when I explained what had happened to my husband, he replied with “Dude … dick move.”

Dick move indeed, knitting needle lady.

P.S. – I would like to note that one of my friends is an avid knitter, and I’m pretty sure if someone actually threw out her needle, she’d be like, “What a bunch of assholes!” but that would be about it. Because she’s reasonable. And sane. She wouldn’t have them looking through piles and piles of trash.

Our plane was late, though, and we ran to the museum through Chicago streets on a  dark, snowy February afternoon. They let us in for free because we arrived 20 minutes before closing. We spent those 20 minutes sitting in front of Seurat’s painting.

And that was the best part of the trip.

Another time, when we were looking at wedding locations in Oregon, we met with a man named Doug Froman. I giggled. I laughed. I asked my husband if Doug was heir to the sausage throne. And then he lost it as well.

And then there was the time when we really were in Central Park in fall. Fortunately, no dresses were torn.

So, for making my travels just a little bit more wonderful, I figure I owe Mr. Hughes a big thank you. Or maybe a danke schoen. Either way. Rest in peace, good sir.

My lack of glamour is your gain.

Dear Mr. Batali,

We’ve never met before. But I did eat at Babbo once (which was great, despite the fact that we were eating with a pair of d-bags), and I took my mom to Enoteca San Marco when we were in Vegas (which she liked okay, and she hates everything). Plus, I’ve seen you on television several times. Personally, I think we’d get along. We have a lot in common: we’re both Italian, we both have relatives in Seattle and Abruzzo, and, judging from photos, we both get a little red-nosed when we drink. Really, if you think about it, it’s surprising we haven’t met sooner.

I even share your affinity for the color orange.

But my intentions today are not to write about preferred colors or common backgrounds. I am writing because you and the good people of PBS need me.

No, seriously. Really.

Okay, fine. Maybe “need” is too strong a word. But still, I could be helpful. Here’s the deal: you seem to be fond of taking trips with other luminaries in the culinary world and filming your adventures. And I love to eat. I know – it seems like almost too much of a coincidence.

I realize that you already have established a winning group of travel companions, including Gwyneth Paltrow. And don’t get me wrong – she seems like a lovely girl (I friggin LOVED Shallow Hal. No, I am not being sarcastic) – but she’s a vegetarian. I, on the other hand, love animals. Because they are delicious. As such, traveling with me is awesome (if you are not a vegetarian, that is. If you are, you may weep). Since I realized you (and perhaps your legal team) might need a bit more persuading, I have created a list of 10 reasons why you should let me join you on your next trip.

1. PBS don’t need sexy. And thankfully, I am not. The good viewers of public television voluntarily watch programs that feature Rick Steves and that monk who bakes. If they wanted to see attractive people, they’d STOP WATCHING PBS. And yet here you are, with the likes of Gwyneth and some beautiful Spanish girl. PBS viewers don’t want that. They want soft. They want squishy. They want occasionally sweat-stained. I am all of those things.
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2. Like you, I’m Italian. I even speak the language. Sort of. I mean, I do when I’m drunk. Which I am willing to be. So we could totally tour Italy. And talk to people. While drunk.
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3.  I will try anything once. When it comes to food that is (I don’t know what else you’ve heard, but it’s probably not true). Seriously. Offal? Awesome. Feet? Neat. Tentacles? Tasty. I love it all, and I’m not freaked out by anything (except mayo. Mayo is nasty). 
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4.  I have absolutely nothing better to do. No kids. No job. Not even a newspaper subscription. Nothing. No one will even notice I’m gone, except for my oft-neglected houseplant (and possibly, after a few weeks, my husband).
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5.  I smell good. Have you ever traveled with a stinky person? It sucks. This would not be the case with me. My hair usually smells nice, I don’t smoke, I love breath mints, and I wear perfume. Overall, I smell pretty awesome. Unless I’m gassy.
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6. You’ll be able to reach my entire audience. Both of them (hi, guys!).
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7. I’d totally appreciate it. Really. I wouldn’t be snobbish or ungrateful or rude. If you take a famous person with you, I bet they won’t enjoy it half as much as I would. Plus, I’ll send you a very nice thank-you card.
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8. I pack light. So you wouldn’t have to lug around my bag or anything. Not that I’d expect you to – I wouldn’t. But I’m just saying.
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9. I am great at car games. So you’d never get bored during the trip. I even make them up myself. My skills know no bounds.
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10. I’ll go halfsies on the gas.

See? It would be a perfect match. We’ll be like Starsky and Hutch, except platonic. And with food (also, I get to be Starsky). Please give it some thought.

Warm Regards,

The Everywhereist

P.S. – Does Bourdain need a sidekick? Just curious.

Wait, wait, wait. You want your luggage to arrive at the same time you do? That’ll cost you.

Note from the everywhereist: I originally submitted this to The New Yorker. While they didn’t accept it, they did send me a very nifty rejection letter saying my work had “evident merit and humor.” And though it may sound sort of pathetic, that rejection letter may have been one of the high points of my career. Also, a big thanks to Philip, Angela, Cristina, and Wendy for their always priceless feedback (you guys are another high point of my career), as well as borman818, who took the above photo.

“You’ve reached Quickie Discount Airlines. How may I help you?

Ah, you’d like to take advantage of our round trip special from Boston to New York for only $39? Of course! And because you’re making your reservation by phone, you waive our $45 online-booking convenience fee. Of course, you incur our $45 phone-booking convenience fee. … Hmm? No, I’m sorry, I can’t waive that fee – not unless you book via another means beside phone or online.

No, at this time, those are the only two methods of booking we offer.

Why yes, of course you may have an aisle seat – for a one-time additional charge of $85. Window seats will run you $75 … Just a middle seat will be sufficient? Very good sir. A middle seat will only carry a $50 surcharge. Why yes – if you find that the seat next to you on the flight is vacant, you most certainly may swap seats. That will incur a $25 convenience fee which will be collected in the cabin. Cash only.
 
Ha ha ha – no, I’m afraid we can’t just ‘duct tape you to the wing instead of bleeding you dry.’ That’s against FAA regulations.

And will you be checking any luggage for this flight? Just a carry-on bag? Wonderful! Unfortunately, due to space constraints all carry-on baggage must be checked. There’s a $127 charge for all checked bags. No, I’m afraid you can’t store it in the overhead compartment. The airline is using that space to carry cargo from a meat processing facility.

No, I’m sorry – you can’t stow your bag underneath the seat in front of you, either. We’ve leased out that space as well. 

Will you be enjoying any beverages on this trip? Yes? Wonderful. Beverages may be purchased for $8. Alcoholic beverages may be purchased for $12. Ice is an additional $3 … Why, yes, you could purchase a drink on the airport and carry it on the flight, but it will subject to a $15 self-carried beverage surcharge.

Well, yes, I suppose you could just ‘drink a whole crapload before getting on the flight.’ No, there’s no regulation against that – our flight crew does it all the time. Though I recommend you purchase a lavatory token in case you need to use the facilities during the flight. They can be purchased in-person at our hub in Beloit, Ohio, for $3, or you can purchase them in-flight for $9. There’s a $2 surcharge for solid waste. 

And will you be purchasing any meals on this flight? No? That’s probably for the best – the credit approval process can be a little slow.

Also, please note that in order to offer such low airfares, we’re unable to provide you with fixed departure or arrival times for your flight. We can assure you that you will depart on or near your departure date, and simply ask that you arrive at the airport 1 to 2 days prior to your flight.
 
What’s that …? Why, quite comfortably! Thank you very much for asking. And how do you sleep at night, sir?”