A holiday with a group of strangers evermore unforgettable
But over margaritas and line dancing, we melded more than tales of home, kids and love gone wrong, the kind of unprepared bonding that makes a vacation with a group of strangers evermore unforgettable.
Part I
1) Sandpoint, Idaho:
We was heading over heels in love with this lakefront town from the moment we proverb it, tucked between the Cabinet and Selkirk mountains in Idaho’s Panhandle similar to some Northwoods Brigadoon.
We prized hearing the thump of an old, spring-loaded wooden door at the Beyond Hope Resort on an August afternoon and a young boy’s hollers as he plunged from a cord swing into sun-dappled Sand Creek. We relished my sunset tour of Lake Pend Oreille, the state’s largest, followed by a solo, late-night foray to a meadow where an amazing meteor squall punctuated the all-encompassing darkness. We can still taste Sandpoint’s greeting to summer, a cold huckleberry daiquiri spiked with the untamed (and, we had quarrel, superior) cousins to Eastern blueberries.
What we keep in mind most, though, was a violent shared wish to keep an more and more bright spotlight of celebrity from rotating Sandpoint into another Telluride or Jackson Hole.
2) The Big Island of Hawaii:
we first meeting with Pele, the respected volcano goddess on the Big Island of Hawaii, was both wonderful and absolutely un-PC: Our tourism helicopter swooped so near her lair on the eastern gap of the Kilauea volcano that we could feel her sulfur-scented breath as we dangled above the fiery abyss.
More than 20 years later, safety and green concerns have nixed such close encounters with one of the world’s most active volcanoes. But Pele still holds sway on Hawaii’s largest island — and on me.
For the duration of one replicate visit, we followed the guide of a wispy-bearded taro farmer as we hiked through a rain forest and into a moon-like lake of crunchy lava formed by eruption decades earlier.
Later on, we watched from the rail of a short-lived cruise ship as Kilauea’s dark flanks were punctuated by orange bruises — smooth, pahoehoe lava that had out of order through the surface of a honeycomb of underground tubes. At land’s end, barely able to be seen through a bombardment of raindrops and flashbulbs, fire met water in a burst of angry steam.
3) Chicago architecture:
Better recognized by its actually expressive nickname, “The Bean” is a showpiece of Millennium Park, a 3-year-old cultural playing field built above railroad tracks and parking lots just north of Grant Park in the Loop (Chicago-ese for downtown). It’s connected by a Frank Gehry-designed music pavilion (think stainless steel tresses being blown askew in a lakefront breeze) and a pair of 50-foot glass towers dubbed the Crown Fountain. Forget Sandburg’s “City of the Big Shoulders”: This is “city of the big lips,” with water spurting from the pursed puckers of human faces predictable onto the towers’ giant video screens.
We can only picture what Sandburg would have thought of the city’s latest architectural speculate, Santiago Calatrava’s Chicago Spire.
You need to read more — Click Part II
