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travel

Wanderlusting for: Stockholm in the Summer

How strongly can you yearn for a place you’ve never seen?

Nordic Lad has been trying to lure me to Stockholm for the better part of two months and his efforts are finally paying off.

Sweden, while on my destination list for a while, never occupied the top spot. It didn’t even make the top five, to be honest (sorry, love)!

I was thinking Beirut or Brasov or Tanzania. Besides, because of Sweden’s fairly close proximity to France, I figured I could always jet up for a long weekend once I was settled back in Paris again.

My sole encounter with Sweden was brief. While  surviving a bleak late autumn in Copenhagen several years ago, I took an abbreviated daytrip to Malmö. I departed the station, walked around the town, a park, got caught in the rain. Aside from a striking, black-haired ‘80s rocker-esque guy, the locals mostly shuffled about wearing gray sweaters and grim expressions. Smitten, I was not.

“Malmö is not Stockholm,” Nordic Lad explained to me in a tone a Manhattanite might use with a befuddled tourist whose sole foray into New York had comprised an afternoon at the Staten Island Mall. “And there is nothing like Stockholm in the summer.”

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Postcards, travel

Postcard #2: Holiday at Lake Tahoe

Emerald Bay/Vikingsholm June, 2011 © Erin Zaleski

The trailhead to the late Lora Josephine Knight’s ’20s-era holiday home looks deceptively summery, but remnants of one of the region’s longest winters–it snowed on June 6– has all but eliminated typical mid-June activities. Swimming is out, most trails are off limits, and the river is too swollen for rafting. What’s a girl (and her visiting Nordic Lad) to do? Take a cue from Tahoe’s jazz age set, of course.

Just as it took a certain level of  ingenuity and determination to construct a Scandinavian-style mansion in the middle of the Sierras, so too does it require resourcefulness and fortitude to find hikes that didn’t involve trudging through tall snow drifts or plunging through river wells (don’t ask me how I know this). The determination paid off, and now I can’t stop raving about Nevada’s steep Flume Trail, where you can catch one of Tahoe’s most picturesque panoramas.

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Journalism, Photography, Photojournalism, travel

Friday Photo: Street, Naples

Naples in the Rain, BLN. March, 2006

One of my favorite guilty pleasures, La Strada is a pictorial rendering of Italian daydreams. Run by a couple of well-known journalists, most pictures are taken on the fly with point-and-shoot cameras or phones. The resulting snapshots depict Italy at its most appetizingly authentic.

Randomness, travel

Planning Stages

Courtesy of Richard Goerg, istock

My poor, neglected blog! Like so many other elements of my life, it has fallen victim to the almost perverse amount of work I have to do between now and late-summer.

So overwhelmed am I with the working, writing, editing, teaching, visa acquiring, ticket-purchasing, apartment hunting, proposal drafting, project completing, loose ends tying, and various day-to-day minutiae (minutiae-ing?), that even the idea of drafting a detailed to-do list is causing mild heart palpitations.

Not that that’s any excuse or anything, of course.

In the meantime, if anyone has any foolproof suggestions for conquering stress (that are somewhat legal and don’t involve copious a.m. Cab consumption), please send them my way.

Friday photo, Photography, travel

Friday Photo: Malibu in Gray

Stilts, Malibu by imagebysp
Stilts, Malibu a photo by imagebysp on Flickr.

“Stilts, Malibu” from Stephen in London.

I spent the day in Malibu today, so I had to select a photo that did it justice. I am probably biased since I have some very personal memories of the place, but beyond the mythic, Hollywood-soaked images most of us associate with Malibu, there is a deeper, richer and darker side to it that not everyone appreciates. Stephen’s photo nails it.

It was clear and blue today, but as I was driving north along the coast the clouds began rolling in again. The sun is low in the sky now and I imagine that the beach has started to look much like it does here.

You can see more of Stephen’s black and white landscapes on his flickr stream.

Postcards, travel

Postcard #1: Southern California Bound

 by erinz
Under the Santa Barabra Pier, a photo by erinz on Flickr.

Taking a road trip to Santa Barbara and L.A. to visit a couple of longtime close friends. Looking forward to salty air, beach treks, crepes on Anacapa, Sunstone Merlot, speeding down PCH in my red car with the moon roof up, smoothies at the Malibu Farmer’s Market, hearing the words “ove'” and “gnar” again, admiring the first Jacaranda blooms, talking late into the evening, and catching a film at the Arlington. Mostly, I am looking forward to reconnecting with my pretty ones.

Links - Writing, travel

On Love, Loss & Travel

World Hum recently ran a beautiful piece by Jeffrey Tayler that examines a bittersweet, often-overlooked side of travel–the roads not taken and the loves left behind. For me, it evoked the transiency inherent in human relationships; a transiency that is felt more acutely for us vagabond sorts.

The natural cycle of friendship unfolds faster for the wanderlust-prone. Intimacy and separations can occur suddenly, and those bonds that form so quickly on the road are often severed with equally jarring swiftness. Itineraries change. Alliances form and shatter. People dance in and out of your life. You share moments or weeks or months with someone, only to move on to a different city, country or decade; the relationships left behind gradually fading in the corner of your memory like postcards you forgot to send.

Over time, those people who played central roles, however briefly, in your daily life recede from your thoughts, occasionally reappearing as flickers of landscapes left behind. Friendships cultivated during my own trips abroad in my teens and early twenties will surface in an abbreviated jumble of sensations: A languid summer meal with Isabelle V. at Sormani in Paris, a dim train compartment en route to Calais with Ineke S., the sound of Marc G.’s buoyant tread on the staircase in a weathered Swiss chalet, the coconut-honey smell of Joey L.’s sunscreen as we lounge on a pebble-clotted Hydra shoreline.

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Friday photo, Photography, travel

Friday Photo: Tuileries in Winter

Tuileries on a mid-December morning. © Erin Zaleski

Tuileries on a mid-December morning. © Erin Zaleski

I took this in mid-December in Paris several years ago. It was unusually sunny, but I was feeling melancholy for numerous reasons. Mostly because I had to fly back to the States the next day.

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