Travel. Anywhere. Just travel.

My mom had surgery in San Francisco today and I’ve taken a solo road trip to come up here and help her convalesce. Despite the unfortunate circumstances for her I’ve been looking forward to this trip for months. I’m away from work, I’m away from kids, I’m away from everyone. This was my opportunity to really spend some alone time and do one of my favorite things, a lengthy road trip. No one to tell me to slow down or turn down the music. No one making me listen to crap music. No kids fighting in the backseat. It’s 600 miles from San Diego to San Francisco up the 101 freeway, nine hours of bliss.

This morning I dropped my kids off at school and immediately hit the road. About 30 miles into my trip my sister calls me and says “Well, surgery’s off, Mom’s had complications. You can turn around and go home.” Go home? I’ve already taken the time off from work. My husband has rearranged his schedule to get the kids to school each morning. We’ve arranged for childcare at night when my husband is at school. I’ve already booked my nonrefundable hotel. No road trip? Really, go home? Hell no! This is fabulous! I don’t have to sit around a hospital room all day! I can finally go to Napa! I can swim to Alcatraz! I can do whatever I want!

While my head is swooning with freedom, my sister calls again and tells me the surgery is back on again. Oh…really? Okay. So my freedom has been reined in just a little, but this is a better outcome for my mom.

I love the drive up the 5 to the 101. I love driving through pretty Carlsbad and Encinitas. I’m fascinated by the giant monolithic breasts of the nuclear power plant at San Onofre. I love driving through my old stomping grounds in Orange County. I love passing by Disneyland, where I have spent so much time both with and without children. I do not love driving through Los Angeles. It’s ugly and the traffic bites. Seeing the Hollywood sign is pretty cool. I love the point north of Calabasas where the freeway crests on top of a mountain and all of a sudden there is an incredible view all the way from Thousand Oaks out to the ocean and the Channel Islands. I love the way the 101 hugs the inward curve of the coast between Ventura and Santa Barbara. During that stretch today I was listening to The Waterboys song “The Big Music”, a big gorgeous soulful song, the sun was striating through the clouds with bright white rays landing on the biggest island, and I swear God could have just floated down one of those rays onto the island and it would have seemed perfectly apropos.

I love the sharp right turn away from the coast through the tunnel that delivers me to Central California. I love the way the 101 intercourses with the land, intermittently jutting out along the ocean and delving back inland again. I love the rolling hills up through San Luis Obispo, and the giant tug I feel to visit Morro Bay (which I denied myself today). I love traveling through the gorgeous vineyards of Paso Robles. I love driving through Salinas and seeing the homage to John Steinbeck, which reminds me that there are still literary people in the world. I love driving through the hilly forest between Salinas and Gilroy looking for the prominent cell phone array fashioned into a fake tree. I love the pungent garlic smell of Gilroy. I love that for the first time I drove through San Jose without sitting in traffic. I love the lights dancing off the water of the San Francisco Bay. It was dark when I finally arrived, and I came around a bend and was breathtaken by the startling panoramic view of downtown San Francisco and the Bay Bridge. Such a beautiful city.

I went to the hospital and visited with my mom and family. She’s good, heavily drugged but fine. Much as I love the journey up here, I love my mom even more. I’m now safely ensconced in my hotel. And I’m free!!!

Today a group of my friends/coworkers and I traveled to Baja, between Rosarito and Ensenada, to deliver presents to an orphanage that my company sponsored for Christmas. There were eight people in my group, including my daughter Zoe and her friend Erin, plus we met up with another group of Americans doing the same thing.

The drive from the border down to Rosarito is beautiful. The road hugs the coast providing spectacular views of the ocean and Coronado islands. We passed stunning mansions and cardboard shacks, huge contrasts of living conditions all nestled in together. We saw a humongous statue of Jesus of a hill that I’ve never noticed before, kind of like the Mexican kitsch version of Rio de Janeiro.

The orphanage is called Door of Faith. It is run by an American couple and staffed by a few more Americans and Mexicans. There are 125 kids living there, from infants to teens. I expected to find poor conditions and sad-eyed kids. Rather, the place is a bright and sunny refuge tucked up in the hills. The kids were laughing and happy, the little ones extremely affectionate and wanting to be carried around and played with. The site is like almost like a summer camp. The grounds are kept well, the kids are required to keep their living spaces neat, the entire orphanage is brightly decorated and well tended.

After a tour of the grounds while the kids ate lunch, we all gathered to watch the kids receive their stockings full of gifts. I snuck around ‘my’ kid, 13 year old Salomon, with a camera to try and capture him opening the stocking we made for him. He received a CD player, several CD’s and some smaller stuff.

The rest of the day was spent playing with the kids and watching them enjoy their presents. I have never worked so hard at trying to communicate. The kids do not speak English at all, but they were very gracious in humoring my remedial Spanish. I was able to have very basic conversations and I could translate for Zoe & Erin and a group of girls their age.

I learned from others who are much more active in these kinds of outreaches that Door of Faith is one of the best run orphanages in Baja. Most other orphanages are apparently impoverished and depressing. I couldn’t help but ask if maybe we should concentrate on those orphanages that need the help more desperately. It does make sense though, that the reason Door of Faith is so well kept is because of the continual assistance they receive from outside groups. There is no question that these kids are loved, well taken care of, and seemingly happy. The director of the orphanage told us that one of his jobs is to travel to other orphanages and teach those directors management, operational and marketing skills, which I thought was a very cool thing to do. (The whole give a man a fish vs. teaching him to fish adage.)

I posted flickr photos from today, if I can figure out how to get them linked.

This was a wonderful experience for all of us.

Yay – Mendocino for Christmas! Two trips up north in January, one to Red Bluff for my grandfather’s 100th birthday, another to San Francisco with my mom. I see lots of wineries in my future.

and I haven’t stopped since. I’ve been fortunate enough to have gone to just about every major place in the world with the exception of Europe and Africa. It surprises a lot of people when I tell them that I haven’t been to Europe, but I think I will enjoy it that much more when I do go.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Travel helps you relate to people more effectively. You not only have something in common with most everyone who has done even a tiny bit of travel, but you also can better understand people’s motivations and values knowing where they’ve come from. You can’t learn this from books or in classes. It truly requires an “experience.” If I had to choose between college and world travel, I would choose travel. It has done more to shape me as a person than anything I’ve done. I plan on buying my son a round-the-world plane ticket for his 18th birthday (lucky for me that still 13 years away!).

There is a famous Elvis Costello lyric that I love: “They say that travel broadens the mind til you can’t get your head out the door…” You can interpret that a bunch of different ways.

There are soooo many different places and languages and cultures out there. And seriously I do just want to travel! I dont really care where..sure there are certain places that I REALLY wanna see lol like Germany and Mexico. But I wanna see France, Italy, Canada, Urugauy, Brazil, Argentina, Slovakia, China, Iceland, Finland…pretty much EVERYWHERE! lol