Getting, away

With the exception of six nights in the hospital last winter, I haven’t been away from home since February, 2020. I miss traveling, though it’s a clear impossibility for me right now: my baby cannot be vaccinated, and so we will wait.

I always imagined I’d be the mom with a teeny infant on planes, passport in the diaper bag, ready to show my child all that I love in the world. Hopefully we’ll be on a plane before too long, but I don’t know when that will be.

But it’s summer. And there’s Airbnb. Knowing I wouldn’t be going in places with my little one, the destination became somewhat fluid: I wanted to be somewhere new, with good food and nice weather, with a low fire risk and within walking distance of enough to keep us busy.

So – baby asleep in the back seat – we drove past SFO, down to a smaller city with all of that available. And our first night, the baby didn’t sleep.

But the next night, he did.

And we ate Thai food, and Indian food, and delicate pastries and bahn mi sandwiches. We drank coffee and Boba tea, wandered the park, watched the people using it in a million ways: as a place to drum, as a place to exercise, as a place to play. We sat on the porch and watched a different corner of the world unfold.

It didn’t really matter where we were. It just mattered that we were there. We were away, and we were happy, and it doesn’t get much better than that.