write me well

Tag: travel

  • Routes (66)

    Kicking off 2026 with a Goliath Post in tribute to how I spent the first two weeks of the year. Buckle up, my dudes!

    Three months ago, the CEO of the non-profit I work for called me into his office and asked me what I was doing for the first two weeks of January. We weren’t even seated for the question, so it seemed inherently casual. He wanted to know – if I didn’t have any plans, that is – would I  be interested in driving from Santa Monica to Chicago, then on to Detroit, following along historic Route 66 as part of a vintage nine-car caravan?

    Full disclosure: sure, I work for an organization wholly inspired by the automobile, but my appreciation for vehicles of any kind is not natural and was borne entirely of seeing Aaron’s interest in these things firsthand. Truthfully, I would likely never have gone for this job if not for Aaron. So while I am always keen for an adventure, when presented with the option to go on this road trip, I was apprehensive. Twelve days is a long time to spend on the road with people that are not friends or family. It’s a long time to drive a car that’s twice as old as I am, to be “on the job”. An adventure, sure. But whoof, a lot of me wondered, at what cost? Am I really enough of a car person to do this?

    I didn’t know the real answer to that question, and in the end it was not my sense of adventure or faith in my ability to fake my car-ness for nearly two weeks straight that made me say yes. It was, I am afraid to say, simply my natural response, ingrained in my emotional muscles from years of being a yes-person. (I’m not proud of it and I’m still working on it! These things take time.) After a week or so of talking to Aaron about it and considering my options, I said yes, and signed up.  

    The Drive Home, the name of this little annual adventure, is a seven-year old partnership between our organization, America’s Automotive Trust, and the Detroit Auto Show. Each year a new drive is planned, always in vintage cars, and always ending at the first day of the show in Detroit. The Drive celebrates the significance of cars in American culture, the importance of not just vintage cars, but maintaining them and keeping them on the road when you can, and really, just the sense of adventure that comes hand-in-hand (or hand-on-wheel) as part of a road trip. In an irresistible turn of timing, 2026 marks the centennial one of America’s most iconic roads: Route 66. There was no question what route this year’s Drive would take – we would be on the Mother Road. 

    On the overcast morning of January 3rd, when we took off from the iconic Santa Monica Pier and headed towards our first stop at the Historic Rancho Cucamonga Fueling Station, I realized I knew nothing about Route 66. I had seen Cars. That’s about it. To fill in the gaps in my knowledge, I imagined that the route was abandoned because it was less efficient and lacked the lanes of the new interstate system, but I still pictured it as a fairly direct highway, kicking off in Santa Monica before following a relatively straight line all the way to Chicago.

    Friends, I was so wrong.

    For those as unknowing as me circa three weeks ago: all Route 66 did was connect a bunch of preexisting town-to-town roads. It’s called the Main Street of America because it IS Main Street for many of its long miles. If you drive any significant stretch of Route 66, you will at many points find yourself on beautiful, historic, sometimes abandoned, sometimes restored and thriving, actual Main Streets of towns in countryside you’d never be able to point out on a map. So many of these towns are still filled with people passionate for the route, passionate for what it meant for Americans when it was first opened. Some of them were born and raised in these places; even more fell in love with the route on their own road trip, picked up their lives, and relocated to Tucumcari, New Mexico; to  Adrian, Texas; to Miami, Oklahoma. You can tell the moment you meet these people that nothing sparks their joy like being a part of Route 66, of preserving it for future generations. There was not a single town we stopped in where this was not my experience.

    It was, in the end, an eleven day road trip, inherently impossible to catalogue effectively in a single post. So, obviously, I did it across eleven different posts on Instagram.

    I continue to hope I will ween myself off of Instagram entirely one day, so in that vein, I’m going to pop everything I put there up on here to make sure my memories don’t disappear suddenly because Instagram unexpectedly dies a death.

    Day 1: Santa Monica to Barstow 🌴>🏜️

    Highlights: Getting to park on Santa Monica pier, the most delicious breakfast & cutest hat from the Mel’s Diner at the endpoint of Route 66, visiting Rancho Cucamonga historic service station and getting an even CUTER hat from said service station, first time wigwam motel experience (just driving through), and finishing off with an A+ dinner at Roy’s Cafe in Barstow.

    Day 2: Barstow, CA to Kingman, AZ 🏜️>👑

    Highlights: First big stretch of Route 66, seeing bush planes taxi at Roy’s Cafe in Amboy, feeding a delightful burro in Oatman, seeing the sun break through the clouds on the Sitgreaves Pass, taking Woody (the ‘65 Country Squire I’m driving) on many twists & turns, a photo op in Cool Springs, and a five-star desert sunset in Kingman.

    Day 3: Kingman, AZ to Winslow, AZ 👑 > 🎶

    Highlights: Everything about the Kingman Visitor’s Center, blue blue skies and all the floofy desert clouds, ghost gas stations galore, the recently restored Osterman Gas Station & the warm welcome we received, not almost running out of gas, remembering to not call Winslow Arizona Winston Arizona, Flagstaff!!, lots of laughing, and being a lot less exhausted than I was this time yesterday.

    Day 4: Winslow, AZ to Albuquerque, NM 🎶 > 🌵

    Highlights: Red Rock Park, the amazing people in Gallup, NM that welcomed us at the El Rancho Hotel, lots of high desert driving, and rolling up to Albuquerque where we got a private tour of the most amazing neon sign collection I’ve ever seen in person.

    Tomorrow marks the halfway point! Maybe I will find a new pose? But probably not 🤣

    Day 5: Albuquerque, NM to Amarillo, TX 🌵 > 👢

    Highlights: Turning a loss (major toe stub first thing in the morning) into a win (spontaneous cozy moccasin purchase at Cline’s Corner), falling in love with the flag of New Mexico and also the gem that is The Blue Swallow Motel, meeting more excellent humans, meeting Izzy the Cat at the Route 66 Midway Point, more neon, and experiencing the beautifully cornball roadside attraction that is The Big Texan Steak Ranch. They do NOT brag enough about their lemon cake.

    Day 6: Amarillo, TX to Weatherford, OK 👢 > 🛠️

    Highlights: The best swag bag from Visit Amarillo, a lovely hotel stay, breakfast tacos, getting to answer emails during daylight hours for the first time since last Wednesday because we got stuck while the 1965 Ford Country Squire got fixed, and finally making it to Weatherford sans any planned stops to catch up with the rest of the crew at 7pm.

    Day 7: Weatherford, OK to Tulsa, OK 🛠️ > 🛤️

    Highlights: Driving the biggest uninterrupted stretch of Route 66 so far (a truly wonderful experience with blue winter skies), Pops on 66 and their A+ modern building and swag, meeting Ed Threatt Sr. at Threatt Filling Station, getting to see the cutest shop in Tulsa that generously worked on several of our caravan cars (@atlasautomotive_route66), & being back in the Squire. One of my favorite days of the trip!

    Day 8: Tulsa, OK to Lebanon, MO 🛤️ > 🌾

    Highlights: Our brief stop at the gem that is the Coleman Theater of Miami (Mia-muh), OK, meeting the locals at Main Street Cafe, seeing the original inspo for Mater in Galena, KS, driving into Lebanon (Leb’nun), MO at sunset, being greeted by a huge crowd that joined us for a Route 66 Museum tour, and eating the best mustard BBQ sauce I have ever had at Smokin’ Joe’s of Wrinks Market, in the company of excellent car and motorcycle people, where I learned the term “cycle [sickle] bum”. Would 100% Leb’nun again.

    Day 9: Lebanon, MO to Springfield, IL 🌾 > 🎩

    Highlights: Yet another blue skied winter day spent driving old stretches of Route 66, the warm welcome from the team in Rolla, MO (including a cat!!), seeing the Gateway Arch for the first time, driving across Bridge of Rocks in the Squire, lunching (fried cheese curds!!) at Weezy’s on 66 (complete with some of the shortest bathroom stalls I’ve seen), a wheat field sunset for the ages, and excellent company in the coolest repurposed building in Springfield, IL at Motorheads Bar & Grill.

    Seeing firsthand why Route 66 is called America’s Main Street continues to be one of the best parts of this trip. Today we finish in Chicago, and tomorrow we cannonball to Detroit to help open the Detroit Auto Show. It’s been a helluva ten days!

    Day 10: Springfield, IL to Chicago, IL 🎩 > 🏙️

    Highlights: Seeing Mama Burger at the Museum of Giants in Atlanta, IL, the first snow !! (just a smidge of it and already on the ground), checking out the Pontiac Museum, and hitting the final stretch of 66 – which was not pretty 🤣 but still an achievement – and getting a photo at the official sign.

    Big Bertha tribute post: (written from the cozy comfort of a 2026 Expedition, because the Squire is now in the trailer for the rest of this journey 🤣)

    I logged just over 2,000 miles in this car in the past ten days, and it was SUCH a trip. Sure, it would’ve been nice to have had a car whose transmission didn’t quit 35 miles outside of Chicago, but she gave all she had to give and we had SO many laughs across 9 states. Born in 1965 and still going (ish), thanks for the journey big girl!

    Day 11: Chicago, IL to Detroit, MI 🏙️ > 🚘

    (For the record, I write this from the comfort of my own bed, having slept for 17 of the last 24 hours.)

    Highlights: THE most beautiful sunrise, only having a minor menty B at a Starbucks in Michigan City, and finally, after 2,300+ miles, making it to Detroit.

    BB, this beautiful 1965 Ford Country Squire, kicked the can due to a slipping transmission 35 miles outside of Chicago. With the help of a trailer, we were able to at least get her dropped off at the Detroit Auto Show. And as she sat there outside the building, with no one in particular super eager to drive her in her slippery state, it became clear that there was only one person that should take her through the convention center doors in the relative safety of her low gear. (It was me.)

    Thanks to everyone who followed along on this very long but also incredibly fast adventure. I know that some genuinely terrible shit has been happening in this country and in the world while I’ve been on this road trip, and at times I almost held off posting because it felt comparatively vacuous and silly to share a giant soda bottle in Arcadia, OK or another picture of the sky. But I will tell you – whether it was the kindness of total strangers, the truly vast and varied landscapes, or moments like catching an anti-facist protest in towns where you least expected it – this was a reminder that there are good people and beautiful things here. And it’s not that I didn’t know that, or that it means you don’t have to do anything to try and fight against what’s happening. Nothing gets done in something a simple as an Instagram caption. But that was my main takeaway from this (albeit exhausting) escape from my regular life. America may be a dumpster fire, but it is so worth trying to save – and more people than you think in places you would not guess feel that way too.

  • So Much Blue

    Things I love: sunshine, tacos, the ocean, and great driving.

    Things we experienced on our four day vacation across the California coast: all of the above.

    This trip was originally planned so that we could visit Aaron’s family for Father’s Day, which we did and had a fantastic time doing. But after we booked the flights and reserved that Sunday for family, we decided that we were deserving of a bit of a treat vacation on either end of it. So one by one, we booked extra plans to really make it an escape: one night beachside in Cambria, two nights in Aptos within walking distance of the Cement Boat (or, at least, what’s left of it), and a bright red mustang to get us both of those places in between visiting friends and family in a very fun way.

    May was a pretty garbage weather month here in Washington, so we were very much in need of sunshine. California, ever faithful, delivered. Aside from an atrocious hour spent in airport security last Saturday morning, we had four near-perfect days of road-tripping, hangouts, and laughter. We ate tacos and burritos and chips and salsa, we played mini-golf on the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, we watched surfers catching overhead waves off of West Cliff. We saw elephant seals and moo cows and horses, all living their best lives, and countless rolling golden hillsides up and down the coast. After our night in Cambria, which I had never visited before, I left with a much fuller appreciation of why Aaron is so eager to return there – if I had spent my last year of college getting to do a daily run along Moonstone Beach, I too would measure every other place I lived against that almost unreachable standard.

    What always strikes me about time spent in the sun is how blue it is. Sunshine, in my mind, is a bright and blazing yellow. When I try to illustrate it with words I reach for butter colors, bursts of citrusy lemon, maybe something akin to mustard if we’re talking sunshine in the fall. But in photographs, and in life, I really feel like sunshine turns out to be very blue. Sunshine is a cloudless azure sky, a rolling turqouise wave, cold clear splashes in a cobalt snowmelt river. And after the soggiest of Mays, we spent four days savoring an almost intoxicating amount of it, whether exploring Morro Bay at sunset, killing time and grabbing iced coffee in Morgan Hill, or driving up Highway 1 near Ragged Point with the windows down.

    We are making a concerted effort to be better at things like taking vacation because, in a truly American turn, it is not something we excel at prioritizing. But a mere four days spent on the road together, surrounded by so much blue, was a wonderful reminder that even simple escapes can go a long way.

  • Roots

    Some of my favorite memories are ones that are impossible to reminisce out loud. I was either alone or surrounded by strangers, which makes me wonder if they ever remember too.  

    Walking to buy popcorn chicken on lunch break from a driver’s education class hosted out the back of a strip mall classroom, hot summer sun and listening to Chutes Too Narrow while reading the book that was about to become my favorite for years. Sitting at countless coffee shops – I have sat at so many coffee shops over the years, because of all of the habits I have formed, it seems to be the longest running. Sometimes with my dog (he’s turning seven this year with a new family, another wild thought), usually alone. Almost always writing, almost never the same thing. Driving up the California coast, having cut through the hills to Laguna Niguel, walking through neighborhoods of the super tanned, super fit, super rich. Watching the ocean on several occasions, because you can never watch the ocean too much.  

    Are you okay? a friend texted me this morning. I’d taken the day before off work, for “reasons”, and she was just checking in. Oh yeah, I reply, Just general what-am-I-doing-with-my-future-life-is-really-weird-right-now malaise. I’m still sitting in that malaise and have been for a week. I spent the last hour looking at apartments in San Diego, even though I’m actively in the middle of sorting out the next phase of my life here in England. But I also spent five hours yesterday watching a show set in sunny southern California, a place that for me will always have a magic glow and impossibly vague siren call. In my dream world, that one with ceaseless funds and a job that allows a semi-rootless existence, I have two homes. One in San Diego, golden and salty and craftsman, with Gilmore, black iced coffees, drives down the 163 and warm walks through North Park and the Gaslamp. A lithe, aesthetic life where I spend my January to June. And across the world, I have my second home, from June to December. A terraced house nestled in a cathedral city, cozy and cold but faultless in the sun, brick and stone and the weight of a storied existence, energy moving from Roman to medieval to Georgian, all within a stone’s throw. A river nearby, because there needs to be water, and books and cups of tea and winding wandering walks, even just to a corner shop for milk.  

    Once when I was living in Long Beach, I decided to make a cake. It was a rare rainy day and I was only missing one or two ingredients. The rain stopped for a few minutes and I tried the tiny grocery a block over, walking rather than driving, getting caught in a downpour moments from the return to my doorstep. I called my mom for company while I baked my cake and tried to explain how much that innocuous walk had reminded me of living in England, of walking to the shops to pick up something, rather than getting into the car. I’ve never owned a car in my years in England, something that will likely change when I eventually leave London, but for now it’s something that draws a very specific divide through my life experiences. Everything about a car feels very Route 66 American, very freeway road trip traffic radio, very windows down Phantom Planet crooning California Here We Come. That will change, but I’m avoiding it. A car is the one form of root I haven’t planted over here. I think something about it makes me nervous in a way I won’t admit.  

    I haven’t had roots in a long time. It’s one of the beauties of being on your own, but it’s becoming exhausting. That’s where the malaise of this week really sits. Hiding beneath the very real exhaustion of living in Unprecedented Times, I’m tired of moving and the excitement of the unknown. I still appreciate how valuable it is to have options. But I would love, very much, to have this be the last “next phase” for a while. Whatever is next needs to last a while. Every move feeds that rootless self, that love of asking myself where do I belong? It makes me want to keep trying new places and finding new homes.  

    But I’ve already found enough homes.

  • History

    Last night Drunk Me did Future Me a favor and spontaneously booked an overdue trip to Oxford for the following morning. (There are worse drunk decisions to make, I’m sure.) The forecast said light rain from 10am through the evening; the reality was a luminous fall day that alternated between broken clouds, bright sunlight, and scattered downpours. In short, your ideal wandering-through-a-thousand-year-old-city fall weather.

    Oxford formed the completion of, shall we call it, the Empress Matilda list. The Empress Matilda list started to form when I first visited the Tower of London back in April and the reality of how close I was to the history I’ve admired from afar for years truly sank in.

    Arundel was the first stop, where Matilda took up the invitation of her friend Adeliza, her step-mother and the former Queen Consort of England, to “come visit” (read: to kick off her bid for the throne in a period of English history that would come to be known as the Anarchy). It was a drizzly, wet spring day, and I narrowly avoided a solid soaking on my way back to the train station that evening. Standing in Arundel Castle was my first experience of sharing steps with one of my historical idols. It dun fucked me up and I LOVED IT. So the Empress Matilda list grew, and Wallingford was next.

    Wallingford Castle was the stronghold of Brian Fitz Count, one of Matilda’s most fast supporters, who ruined himself for no apparent reason other than his passion for her cause (insert courtly romance projections here). Wallingford oversaw the whole of the Thames Valley, bolstered by its vital river crossing, and throughout the Anarchy it remained, through Brian’s zeal, a pro-Empress battlefront. All that’s left today (I’m looking at you, Civil War) is a few scraps of wall and the rolling earthworks upon which the Norman castle originally sat. When I visited Wallingford, it was a high summer day – zero clouds, a thousand rays of sun, and market stalls and ice cream trucks spread from the town square to the riverfront. I stood on a small bridge between the castle meadows and the remnants of the motte and took a 360-degree video, sweating in my shorts and t-shirt and surrounded by the buzz of summer fauna, wondering at the sensation of breathing in the same space as Matilda, as Brian.

    Winchester was next.

    Matilda came close – SO close – to being England’s first ruling queen. Winchester was her moment. It was before she made it to London and the mob chased her out – and it was after her cousin Stephen, the king, had been captured at the epic Battle of Lincoln. Welcomed by Stephen’s own brother, the exceptionally oily Bishop Henry of Winchester, she processed down Winchester Cathedral and was named Lady of the English. She didn’t know that within six months Stephen would be back on the throne and the war would have returned to a bloody stalemate, so I imagine it felt like the first step in finally winning. At least, that’s what I imagined when I was sitting in the same cathedral.

    After Matilda was driven from London, Winchester became the scene of one of her many narrow escapes. Surrounded by the enemy (Bishop Henry’s men – see, oily!), her half-brother Robert of Gloucester held off attack and was captured so she could escape alone with none other than Brian of Wallingford, alone on horseback, riding astride like a man to the point of exhaustion until they reached the safety of Devizes Castle. And after seeing what she had escaped in Winchester, I had to see what she escaped in Oxford.

    That brings us to today – or, last night, when I decided I’d left off the last trip in my journey of major Matilda destinations for long enough. So I caught a train from Marylebone Station at 9:00am this morning and made my way to Oxford Castle. I arrived just in time for the 10:30am castle tour and walked up the same stairs Matilda did, while under siege, wondering how she could possibly escape what seemed in every way to be a full-proof trap. Most people would have given up, surrounded by an enemy army with no hope of reprieve (Stephen had famously let Matilda leave Arundel Castle unmolested back in 1139 under the excuse that she was simply going to go visit her brother Robert, a decision that historians still wonder at and I’m sure Stephen himself largely regretted for the rest of his life). But not Matilda. A freezing night in December, three months into the siege, she and three of her knights wore white cloaks and were lowered out of the castle onto the frozen Thames with knotted bed sheets, where they escaped by walking directly through Stephen’s encamped army under cover of snow, darkness, and luck.

    All of these adventures, all of these moments, are true stories taken from the exceptional life of an exceptional woman – and they are only a handful in the grand scheme of what she endured. Prior to the Anarchy she had already been sent to Germany to marry the Holy Roman Emperor – twenty years her senior – where she then traveled much of Europe with her husband and was by all accounts an appropriately involved and loved imperial consort. When her husband died she was pulled back to Normandy and forced to remarry, only this time to a cocky little shit (the fourteen year old son of an Angevin count) who, upon their marriage, hated her as avidly as she hated him. Their tumultuous marriage eventually produced the first Plantagenet King, Henry II, but not before she attempted to leave Geoffrey and her father forced a reconciliation while she hid in Rouen for over a year.

    Matilda should have been remembered as England’s first ruling queen, but instead she’s unknown to most, and in the ultimate irony, was honored even in death by an epitaph that couched her importance entirely in her relationship with men: “Here lies the daughter, wife, and mother of Henry. Great by birth, greater by marriage, greatest in her offspring.”

    So if you’ve ever wondered why I wax poetic about this woman, or why I’m so fascinated by her story, or why I got an enormous portrait tattoo of her, that is why. Every person that asks me is one more person that gets to find out she was so much more than a daughter, wife, and mother. She was a passionate woman desperate to be accorded the respect that men and kings had purely by virtue of their sex. And I can’t get over the fact that not only are women still facing those problems 900 years later, but that her story is so little known to them.

    The struggle isn’t new – but we can sure as hell be inspired by those who fought it before us. Matilda was certainly one of them.

  • Driving Forces

    (Aside: Up until about twenty minutes ago I had developed a new love for the simplicity of using Notepad to write with. I was 90% done with this blog post when my computer decided to die before I’d hit save.

    So, suffice it to say, one serious rage session later, I’ve ditched simplicity and am now back on Word. WHERE THEY HAVE DOCUMENT RECOVERY.)

    Summer has a tendency to inspire promise: impending adventures, previously unfulfilled personal sojourns imminently poised to become life’s Next Big Thing. Every year it’s like hearing Natasha Bedingfield’s Unwritten for the first time all over again and I always feel like I can take over the world. This year, I settled for kicking June off with my first trip to Spain.

    Three days in Madrid saw me reunited with Jaime and Edu, who along with helping me begin a life-long obsession with jamón, showed me first-hand all of the corners of the city that made them fall in love with Spain in the first place. I even snagged a true local Madrid experience when Edu’s family was gracious enough to host me for the duration of my stay. (In fact, if I can avoid hotels for the majority of my European adventures, all the better. Nothing beats a local neighborhood experience.) The Luchena Ruizs put on a stunning spread of Spanish food all three nights I stayed there, we ventured into the city and drank cheap delicious wine and ate free fabulous tapas late into the warm Spanish evenings, and I spoke a lot of terrible, terrible Spanish (I exaggerate. Mostly I just said “gracias” very poorly). What more can you ask of an early summer Spanish vacation?

    If you said “see the Mediterranean Sea for the first time” then you are SPOT on, my friends. So after saying farewell to the Luchena Ruiz clan, I hopped onto a train to the beautiful seaside city of Valencia, and it did not disappoint.

    My friend Suzy met me in there, and after spending our first evening exploring downtown and enjoying the tapas and wine (and gelato and bats) there included, the following three days were filled with sunshine-y, sunscreen-y bliss, parked on the beach watching utterly comfortable Spaniards lazing around La Malvarosa and diving into the Mediterranean.

    I had a moment back when I visited Arundel and stood in the same rooms as Empress Matilda, a moment of that sort of knowing and feeling that Natasha Bedingfield so shamelessly inspires. I had another one when I visited the Tower of London and stood in the same rooms where Stephen, Henry, Eleanor, and Richard had, in turn, stood.

    Standing waist-deep in the Mediterranean was another one of those moments.

    This was the same sea that the Ancient Greeks sailed. That the Normans sailed. That Empress Matilda looked out over before she ever returned to England. That Eleanor of Aquitaine covered when she joined her husband on crusade.

    I like to think that all ancient places and landscapes have their own energy, invariably thrumming at their own frequency. The Pacific Ocean is somehow fiery; it’s confident, endless, and always crashing. This sea was calm. It lacked the kinetic, impressive, white-capped waves that crashed along the entire breadth of the California coastline, the kind of waves I’d grown up with my entire life. And this water’s energy was different, less obvious, and buried deep. It was huge and capable of much but burned itself out over thousands of years, happy now, for the most part, to sit and be admired until it saw otherwise necessary.

    While swimming in that calm, feeling that thrum, I had the moment. I knew that my next adventure had to be in Italy.

    About a week ago, I was doing some casual online research on the Normans. (Any time spent substantiating my strange Norman obsession is time well spent. Obviously.) Now, most people have heard of the Norman Conquest of England. William the Conqueror was fairly effective and kind of changed the entire course of English history so, I mean, it makes sense. But something that’s less talked about (she writes, as if you generally run into people discussing the Norman Conquest whenever you’re grabbing coffee at Starbucks) is the Norman conquest of southern Italy, and the eventual Kingdom of Sicily that they then ruled for a decent chunk of medieval history.

    If you grab a map and take a look at the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, you’d see that it included all of Calabria. Also known as the region of Italy from which my great grandfather immigrated in 1912, from whom I, one hundred years later, claimed my dual citizenship so I could move back here. When I saw that, I thought to myself, “I’m not going to jump to any conclusions here, but MAYBE, SOMEWHERE, way back in my Italian ancestry, I MIGHT BE NORMAN!”

    And I am fully aware that that is useless, irrelevant, ridiculous information that changes absolutely nothing about who I am as a person and in no way effects the present. But the romantic half of me – which wields a hefty amount of power these days – can’t get past it. It’s that part of me that walked into the Mediterranean, looked out across the ancient water and thought, “Y’know what? Italy, you’re next.”

    History is just so astounding.

    There’s one more uniquely Kathy moment that happened in Valencia, and I’m quite sure I’ll have this one in my list of all-time favorites for years to come.

    Suzy and I stayed at an Airbnb in historic old town Valencia, in a 1930’s era apartment decorated by an exceptionally hipster pair of local Valencian guys that respectively moonlighted as a DJ and a photographer. One of the reasons I picked the place was that it had a tiny balcony that opened onto Carrer de Sant Vincent Martir (on which, I pictured, Suzy and I would drink black coffee and eat breakfast each morning before heading out to the beach. On which, unsurprisingly, we never did.)

    The last night we were in the city, Suzy fell asleep the second her head hit the pillow. I couldn’t sleep so I went out to the main room, threw the balcony shutters open, and listened to this late-night, outdoor concert that happened to be going on in the street below. It was a local high school band and after a few songs and a bit of nostalgia, I decided to pop in my headphones and watch an episode of Vikings until I got sleepy.

    My headphones were such that even with the open shutters, I couldn’t hear the concert over Ivar the Boneless being obnoxious and horrifying.. That was, until, during a quiet moment of the show, when I thought I heard something familiar coming from the street below.

    I threw down my head phones, ran outside, and sure enough, the band was playing a song I hadn’t heard in years. But the years hadn’t changed how blood-stirring it was, nor how impossibly strong the memories attached to it were. It was the opening overture from the (notoriously hammy and complete classic) 1991 film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. And it immediately took me back to being a kid, watching it with my sisters, seeing the camera pan across the Bayeux Tapestry, having never heard of the Bayeux Tapestry or having any concept of what the Norman Conquest was.

    It was a moment of pure magic. Nearly midnight, in the balmy streets of Valencia, in the house of total strangers, twenty-nine years old and still a shamelessly believer in life-changing epiphanies, feeling my heart thrum when the French horns kicked in. There’s not a feeling like it.

    Usually coming home from vacation is a struggle, but I left Spain feeling almost impossibly fulfilled. Toss in some very exciting work things on the horizon – which I’ll share more about if and when they come to pass – and this June has been everything I’ve come to expect from summer.

    (Considering the season doesn’t really even start for two more days, I’m feeling pretty good about it.)