It’s November and my husband and I are talking about what to do over Christmas break. It will be our first one with Mckenna living outside the house, meaning we have a chunk of time off school and work, and a new level of freedom. I want to go somewhere. My eyes flash heart bubbles filled with the words HAWAII and NEW YORK CITY, my hands under my chin, puppy eyes. Even though I know we are in a budget crisis, I am hoping he will make a bad decision with me. The discussion turns to how to make the holiday meaningful with less presents under the tree, and where we could go within driving distance. So what’s a pair of wanderlusting parents to do? Pack up the car and go visit relatives. Shane and Rachel, to be specific.

 

 

Halfway through the seven hour trip, we let our teenage son take the wheel. Never in my life have I been more sure we would all end up dead in a ditch on the side of the 5 freeway. Not because he is a bad driver, but because he is a teenager. I don’t believe those two go hand in hand, it’s just that he lacks experience, and experience is everything. I sit in the backseat and white knuckle it while Jeff plays co-pilot, trying not to pay attention to every car that comes close to us, every lane change, every sudden stop. I lose it and yell at him once. I must admit that the music my husband had chosen to finish off the trip with was grating on my last nerve, and Drew had taken too long to change lanes for our final exit. I am frazzled, ready to get out of the car, and very very ready for a nice strong DRANK upon arrival. Gladly, Shane obliges. We make tacos, listen to records, love on their pets, and go to bed. We are spending the next day (NYE) in the city.

 

 

We eat and walk and drink our way through coffee shops and all of our usual stops. We take photos in the photo booth we always stop at when we visit. We get chowder in a bread bowl. We buy new sunglasses in one of those awful tourist traps near the wharf. My newly driving teenage son picks out the most godawful pair (think agents in Matrix) and I (half jokingly) forbid him from buying them. He buys them anyways. I secretly love that he does, even though I tease him the rest of the day about them.

One of the best things is bringing a car into the city and having my brother drive us around, windows down to take everything in. Every block in San Francisco has a different smell, and I love them all. One of these days we will go in with the express purpose of driving me around and dropping me off whenever I see something I need to photograph, and he can drive around the block and come back to pick me up.

We didn’t realize that most things would close early because of New Years Eve, but duh, we should have realized. After eating pizza and tacos while walking down Haight, we drive back to their place. We play Heads Up and make a late night grocery store run for ice cream. As it gets closer to midnight, we take a walk with Cali the cattle dog, all of us bundled up, to a hill that looks out over the bay. It feels like our little secret, taking a walk so late at night, with no one around. We wait for fireworks, count down the seconds, and see some off in the distance. We stand in the parking lot together. We all scream out: HAPPY NEW YEAR!

 

 

January 1, 2015. We leave early in the morning and drive to Big Sur. Well, I (gladly) drive and my family naps and listens to music in the backseat. It’s a sleepy, warm from the sun on the windows kind of drive, and I am relaxed and content. We drive through so many places I have never seen, and that’s really my best best thing, to see places I have never seen. The trip is easy and the roads are wide open and my phone is shuffling the very best songs that just so happen to fit the mood perfectly. There’s nothing better than when shuffle surprises you with songs that fit the mood. Jeff gets carsick on windy roads, so we stop to get some air. The wind whips around us and it feels so satisfying after being in the warm stuffy car for so long.

We are in a forest that is on the cliff of an ocean. The water is bluer than blue. I marvel and photograph. We are lucky to be here.

 

 

We pull off to take a walk and explore. For months I’ve been cra-a-a-ving forest, been dying to stand and breathe in the scent of the trees, crunch walk underneath them, and forage the ground for treasures. This day trip is mostly for me. It is everything I wanted and more. The smell, you guys, THE SMELL OF THE TREES. The weight of the silence mixed with the crunch of all of our shoes on the forest floor. Rachel finds the most delicate skeletal leaf form and gives it to Anna. I take in every little fern and moss and fallen log, lagging in the back of our group most of the time because I keep stopping. We find a creek we wish we could jump into. (Too cold.) I could spend days/weeks/months soaking up the energy of these trees but it is getting dark before we wanted it to and we have one more stop we want to make.

We make a quick stop for snacks, and Anna and I both purchase Pyrite (fool’s gold) to keep as a memory of our day.

 

 

McWay Falls, Big Sur. “Follow the way of the love dog” is scratched into a fence. Someone has climbed down what looks to be an impossible to climb down cliff to write “I LOVE U SOOOOOOO” in the sand below us. There are probably 30 other photographers at this location, all set up with tripods, all aiming in the same direction, waiting for the perfect time to take their perfect sunset photo of one of the most photographed locations in California. The walkway is crowded and the kids are distracted so I grab Jeff just to do something different than what everyone else is doing. I walk further down the path to get some time alone with him and a different view. We come to a clearing where there’s a small group waiting for the sunset. We take a moment to connect after a few days of being surrounded and then we snag a spot on a bench to snuggle. Shane, Rach, and the kids meander down to find us, our kids just loving to interrupt us mid canoodle.

“Hiiiii, guys,” Nathan says to us, in his nasally Urkel character voice. We laugh and I pretend to punch him and we make room for them on the bench.

I have recently seen the movie Wild, and read the book. I was deeply, deeply moved by both. In them, Cheryl Strayed shares something her mom had always said to her, “There’s a sunrise and sunset every day, and you can choose to be there for it. You can put yourself in the way of beauty.” This has become my motto, something I think of often, something I have written on the chalkboard in our bathroom. And as we sit there together, watching the first sunset of 2015, I am so happy to be there.

The sun sets and the crowd around us cheers and we take photos. My husband, who knows how much I wanted this trip, who knows how long I had craved our time here, looks at me with that smile of his that I love and asks me, “Are you all filled up?”