Category: travel

Can’t take the mountains out of the girl

eamillikinLeave a comment

Liz here, reporting from Central Illinois. This might be the opposite of the slackcountry.Illinois sky

Out here, the geography is flattened, pounded low by a heavenly mallet. Corn fields alternate with soybean fields while the extent of biodiversity appears to be the sporadic inclusion of wheat, rye, and hay. The rainy spring meant for late planting. The corn is only up to my knees, its long leaves trembling in the near-constant breeze.

I’m not fond of this topography. I long for the rambling hills back home (rather, the rambling hills of anywhere else), but I’m here now. So I’m making the most of it by mounting up and going for long rides down straight roads.

My dad is big into bicycling these days, and I must have caught the bug from him. In Burlington, cycling makes sense as a means to an end – a fast way to get around town. Out here, cycling is the chance to experience the subtle shifts in geography from a different perspective. What from a car looks straight and flat is really lightly curved and undulating under the hot, edgeless sky.

Father's Day ride in central IllinoisI’ve done well over a hundred miles since I flew in last Friday, logging time with my father after work and with some of his cycling buddies while he’s away. Father-daughter bonding time well spent (although I’m getting real sick and tired off all this heat. I don’t mind pain, but I can’t stand being warm!).

I timed my yearly trip perfectly. Monday, the local bike shop hosted a Liv/Giant event bringing cycling women together for test rides and a little bicycle maintenance 101. I took a spin on one of these beauties: the Avail Advanced. Between that and joy rides on Dad’s Roubaix, I’m afraid I’ll have a hard time transitioning back to my darling cyclocross.

Oh well. At least I’m not stuck inside.

Camp days

eamillikinLeave a comment

Where I grew up, “camp” was the word most people used to describe summer camps; places where they left their children for weeks or months at a time. In my family, camp meant a little red house on the banks of Lake Seymour. It’s too home-like to be a cottage, too rustic for a summer house. This place lies smack dab in the middle of cottage and home. It’s camp.

I just finished Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel, which has me daydreaming of far-off shores, but also reminded me of why I love it here – a little red house resting quietly on a lake in the Northeast Kingdom.Seymour Lake

At night, I sleep on the back porch with every window thrown open and the brook raging in my ears. The trees are our curtains. In the morning, I brew weak coffee in the percolator and drink it all day long. I sweep the front deck and set out the chair cushions. The lake is at our doorstep. She has her moods – rowdy in the morning and calm at night, or vice versa. She is wide enough that motorboats don’t cause a ruckus and deep enough that she never really gets warm. Even in July, her crystal-clear waters make you gasp. It’s best to just dive in.

Our main view is of the pointed hill across the lake. (It’s name is Elon, but I always think of it as Élan.) Behind it, the pointed peaks of Mount Westmore. Stretching like a snout from the hill into the water is Wolf Point. It certainly looks like a long canine muzzle, complete with a defined patch of conifers for a nose. I sometimes wish it didn’t look so much like a nose… I find myself staring at it when I really could be looking at other things –

Like the loons diving into the water, or the conical silhouettes of conifers against their round, deciduous neighbors.

After an evening run along VT Route 111, I cool my muscles the fastest way I can think of – by walking into the water. The water level is high this week, so it takes just a few steps to reach my thigh. I dive in. I don’t fully know how to describe the shock of submerging oneself in truly cold water. It’s as if your cells go into panic mode as your mind narrows to encompass one simple word (COLD) and one simple purpose (GET OUT YOU CRAZY GIRL). I don’t stay in for long; just a minute or two. But before I leave the water, I smile and touch my wet fingers to my lips. Thank you, I love you.

–

If you’re looking for me this week, I’m not around. I’m just spending a few days by the lake and nights on the porch of a little red camp. The brook will sing me to sleep.

Wanderlust

eamillikinLeave a comment

It’s been too long since I last disappeared. I miss the weight of a rucksack on my shoulder. I miss the moment when I first step off of a metro in a strange new city; the nanosecond-long pause to inhale the new air and realize it’s just the same as the air at home.

(I lost countless photographs in a hard-drive crash during college. I have so few photos left from my travels… Here’s one. Hopefully hard copies of the rest have survived, buried somewhere in my parents’ basement.)

A moment's rest on Mt Luxmore.
A moment’s rest on Mt Luxmore.

“You’re coming to realize that travel anywhere is often a matter of exploring half-understood desires. Sometimes, those desires lead you in new and wonderful directions; other times, you wind up trying to understand just what it was you desired in the first place. And, as often as not, you find yourself playing the role of charlatan as you explore the hazy frontier between where you are, who you are, and who it is you might want to be.”

Rolf Potts, from“Tantric Sex for Dilettantes”