Adventure Mom

A Votre Service – At Your Service “ Coucou !” Monsieur Bar Fly is drunk. It’s two in the afternoon, and JL has been here all day, swilling pint after pint of Cardinal beer. He steps outside every five minutes to smoke. He’s lonely. Bored. And I’m one of two people at this auberge (inn) he can target. I try to blend with the dining room furniture when JL finds me again. “ Coucou !” I’ve already seen him several times this week, and feel familiar enough and annoyed enough to let him have it: “Pas ‘coucou!’ N’avez vous rien de faire toute la journee?” Translation: “No ‘ coucou ’ [in this case, ‘hello’ and ‘peek-a-boo’ at once]. Don’t you have anything to do all day?” No. It’s JL’s day off, and this world offers two choices: pickling his liver and scarring his lungs. The monsieur is one of several characters who frequent the restaurant and inn my friends, Anne and Arthur, own. Called L’Armailli (pronounced larm-ay-ee), it’s named after a herder of cows and goats ...

                Soddisfatta - Satisfied Winter in New Zealand left me cold and hollow, with appetite for little else but turning up the heat. After less than a week of Italian summer, I’m warm and sated. Full of pasta, bread and gratitude. Sono soddisfatta . Sono sazia. I’m satisfied. And full.   Sofia, Fiona, Finley We stayed with our former exchange student, Sofia. Her parents’ three-story house was built in 1928 in the shadow of a church whose bells toll each half hour. The village of 1000 people sits north of Milan. Sofia’s dad, Bob, fetched us from the airport, setting the tone for five and-a-half days with the Franchinis. Rather than play the role for which I’m self-taught -- floundering tourist -- I was, instead, housed, fed and driven to interesting places. Spoiled. Viziato . Maya Angelou said people will forget what you said and did, but will never forget h...

                                           Sleepless in Dubai     A friend told me, as the kids and I embarked on our world tour eight years ago, the word   “travel” originated from the French word “travail,” which means work.   Travel may be less onerous today than in ancient times, but it’s no baguette-and-brie picnic when you spend ten hours in your departure airport, 18 hours in the air and arrive at your hotel at eight am, exhausted, smelly, wearing teeth wrapped in pashminas. This is the state in which Fiona, Finley and I arrive in Dubai. After a snack in the hotel coffee shop and too-brief nap, we hop a hotel shuttle van to the Dubai Mall. Spending three seconds outside in 40 degree Celsius/104 Fahrenheit heat morphs me into a...

                Happy 57th Birthday, Sean It’s the shortest day of the year in New Zealand, the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere and the day our Prime Minister gave birth to a baby girl. The kids and I have a another reason to celebrate and be sad - today would’ve been Sean’s 57th birthday.  Tonight, I showed Fiona photos of Sean taken the month before he got sick, when we were on holiday and when he took her to kindergarten on her first day. Fi looked at me with big, sad eyes, saying, “I’m glad we have those photos, because I’m forgetting what Daddy looked like.” I hugged her, and told her I understood, that she’s proof Daddy and I loved each other. If it weren’t for Fiona and Finley, most days I wouldn’t believe Sean and I had been married ten years. It was another life, a period marked by our babies’ arrivals, the move to a new neighborhood and the start of new jobs for both of us. We were percolating with pos...

Swimming The guy with the light-brown hair. It's his fault. From a distance, I catch a half-second glimpse of Sean. Fancy meeting my late husband in New Zealand at his ten-year-old's school swimming day. Not-Sean clambers up the steep bleacher seats at the Mount Maunganui College pool, just feet from where I sit. I steal a glance, and of course, he looks nothing like Sean. Only the color of his hair and maybe the outline of his nose is faintly reminiscent. It's enough to send my fingers digging into my purse like a dog scratching for lost treasure - only I'm looking for a tissue to dab my watery eyes and blow my nose. Sunglasses help. So it happened, on this sixth year after Sean's death that I'm crying at the pool. It's a little more than a month after the anniversary of his death. For the first time, I forgot about January 23rd, oblivious to its significance as I enjoyed the waning days of the grandparents' visit with us and the end of ...

Nearly Dry January was wet, wet, wet... It’s the first of March. This means I can let myself drink alcohol again. I spent the month of February dry. That’s not entirely true – I did, after all, give myself a hall pass Waitangi weekend (Feb 6-8), indulging in a glass of sparkling wine after a 24-kilometer (15 mile) relay run and two glasses of white wine on our wedding anniversary the following night. My big, boozy weekend.  Over summer, a pattern had crept in – I’d have a drink almost every day. Granted, that drink was often light (2.5% alcohol) beer or a small glass of wine. But I was consistent, and Iooked forward to that drink. While I like to think I'm a Midwestern-born moderate, if I had to categorize my relationship to alcohol on Facebook, I’d say, “It’s complicated.” It’s fun to feel the effects of a couple drinks. It sucks to see the effects of chronic use in people I love– lost dollars, increased weight, accidents, illnesses, break-ups, hours of lost sleep and squan...

Whipped and Chained “When are we gonna be there?” asks Fiona. “Can we get out?” asks Finley. I don’t know, and yes . We’re driving from a lodge in New Zealand’s central North Island – in Ohakune – to the ski field at Mt Ruapehu called Turoa. It’s early in the season, but there’s enough snow (81 cm) to ski. First, we must get there. We navigate three kilometers of the 17 kilometer (about 10 mile) road without a hitch. I snap photos of snow-covered pine and fern trees. We never see snow at sea level, where we live. The road gets icy, and a line of cars forms. The Ohakune Mountain road becomes a parking lot. It’s a barely-moving conveyor of cars and minivans unequipped for these conditions. The road requires either four-wheel drive or tires (tyres) with chains. We have neither. Actually, we have a four-wheel drive sitting in the garage. It’s part of Pete’s collection of possibly useful items which mostly sit in our garage. We’re in Pete’s work car – a Toyota Camry hybri...