oh, this traveling life

Just one of the many things we are attempting on this trip would be enough. For instance, a food tour. A national park tour. A visiting friends and family tour. A working/writing-only tour. A city sight-seeing tour. As do millions in America, we are multitasking.

I am weary of configuring and reconfiguring our plans. Tonight we are headed back to CA for a month for some more familiar multitasking between the bay area and Santa Barbara - plus a wedding in Yosemite in January. While I long for the ease of familiarity, I also feel in limbo between what I know and what I would like to know - not quite psyched up for either. Of course, we will still be traveling at home, as we have no permanent residence. So, perhaps it is really our very own place that I long for more than anything else. A home base. And yet I am disinclined to relinquish our vagabond life, in which daily life is more challenging, but also more provocative and refreshing. The pendulum has a longer swing between exhaustion and elation.

Enough of this contemplative circle of thought. How about some food?

I had my first Moroccan food in Northampton, MA back in November, before Thanksgiving covered us in our first road trip snow in Westford, MA. Tagine Kefta arrived 'neath a ceramic circus tent under warm lights in a small room crammed with tables, chairs and bodies. I reflected with delight that there are always new ways to have my favorite meat: lamb. Hankering for sweets post-kefta brought me to check out honey drops, bird's nests, and bourma. All variations of honey, papery dough, and nuts.

We have done a New York pizza tour of sorts. The thiner the crust and the more caramelized the onions, the better. I had a rainbow assortment of sushi the day after Thanksgiving with our friend Jon's family. My single contribution to the menu choices - sea urchin - was my least favorite. Both squishy and chewy and with a flavor my tongue could not decide upon, I understood why one of the characters on Lost threw it up though he was desperate for protein. Yes, we are addicted to another TV show. We anxiously await the moment when iTunes updates its show list with last week's episode. They are late. Is there some holiday break in prime time we don't know about? Bit torrent doesn't have it either.

By the middle of our 3-day stint in the fabled city of many a story (NYC), I had abandoned any semblance of dietary goodness. Two hot dogs and a surprisingly ubiquitous papaya drink late on Friday night were the clinchers. Since then I've been eating tons of pizza and corn bread and pancakes and toast (I've recently discovered that my digestive tract is fed up with the oldest domesticated grain and lets me know this every time I ingest it), and meat without regard to its life before my gastric juices.

I have learned not to listen to random people in bus stations when it comes to finding the right terminal, floor, and corridor. Luckily we had some minutes to spare while we careened around Port Authority, sweating in down jackets pressed into our backs by ungainly backpacks. Now we are in for the long wait: a flight delayed one hour, due to arrive in San Francisco at 1:45 am by our bodies. This is the first time in recent memory that battery life on laptops and iPods is of utmost concern. Not generally accustomed to 6-hour flights and all the attendant travel it takes to get oneself from Park Slope in Brooklyn to the gate at Newark's Liberty International, I was unprepared for this. Shoulda found out about that battery life law suit for my iPod earlier, before the chance to get a replacement for free expired.

While my state of mind is one of weariness and this blog seems like a lot of complaining, I have had a lot of exhilaration and glee since my last post. Since I can no longer see the beginning of this blog in my text editor, I will tell you about only one of those rapturous moments and leave the rest to arise in later posts: rounding the corner inside the traveling Bodies exhibit to see a vermillion, sea-creature spectacle of blood vessels - a human body comprised of nothing else but its circulatory system, suspended and encased in clear plastic. That was one moment in 2 hours of gazing intently at silicon polymer-preserved human bodies. Neither Adam nor I are much for museums, but this was a hearty exception.

Here's to a safe flight and to all who have helped us along our way.