ICEBOX PLUMS: Moments, sweet and cold
travel blogs and more
Sometime last snowy December, Guy paused in the kitchen and mentioned that he planned to spend the month of March riding his bike in Spain, on the island of Mallorca. A few beats later, he said that I could come, too, if I were so inclined. I thought about it. I sat in my pandemic …
A FEW NOTES: Dumplings are delicious for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The older and shorter a Chinese woman is, the harder she will shove you out of her way. This theory includes, but is not limited to, old women in wheelchairs. Every Chinese city is the “Best” at something. As are Chinese museums, roads, trains …
Oliva collected us promptly on the morning of our first day. She bustled us down the alley and loaded us into our emperor’s van. This time she wore a long dark wool coat with a felted shapes on the back, mostly a rather menacing and undernourished Santa Claus-like figure holding a scroll that said …
We landed in Beijing at 7:00 on Friday night, and even though I had sent the budget tour company the wrong arrival time, our guide met us anyway, a tiny young woman in the shouting airport throng, wearing a bright red hat and scarf and smiling a smile that took up most of her face. She …
Banos, Ecuador Monday, January 19, 2015 Maybe the Galapagos would be better off if we all just left it alone. I can't get around the irony of hundreds of thousands of people paying a bunch of money to come to a place that is special because it is "untouched", and then touching it …
Buccaneer's Bay, Galápagos, Ecuador Friday, January 16, 2015 Here we are in the Galapagos. I'd envisioned the Galapagos as a kind of modern day Eden, where giant tortoises and sea lions snuggled on white sand beaches, framed by waving grasses and gently chirping finches. I imagined Darwin twirling among them all-- a bearded …
Fernandina, Galapagos Islands, Ecuador Tuesday, January 13, 2015 We're on a National Geographic/Sven Linblad boat called the "Islander" cruising through the Galapagos Islands. I would like to see an albatross, though we probably won’t get far enough south. I'm reading a book called "The Lifeboat" in which a Titanic-like boat sinks, leaving …
Mindo, Ecuador Thursday, January 8, 2015 Our first day in Ecuador, we visited THE CENTER OF THE EARTH! Well, that's what I thought it was, but I was corrected. Pro-tip: When you are in a carload of engineers, even if two of the three of them …
Copenhagen, Hovedstaden, Denmark Tuesday, May 9, 2017 When my boys turned five, I got them ponies. There was Texas, a wily pinto gelding, and Daffodil, a palomino with a white stripe down her lovely face. The ponies would live in our backyard, except for on Christmas morning, when they would come in the house …
My mom used to shrug off indulgence with a poem. “This is just to say”, she would murmur, slicing the dense chocolate cake frosted with fudge so thick that we could peel it off and eat it in slabs. “So sweet/and so cold”, I would finish, reaching around her to sliver off my own corner …
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ICEBOX PLUMS: Moments, sweet and cold 