Road Trip Blogbligation

My sister Emily recently coined the term "blogshaustion" to explain the exhaustion one experiences when there is simply to much to blog about. I think I'll coin another term here: "Blogbligation" (It's a little tricky to say, but I think it will catch on.) It's the feeling that you are obligated to blog about certain events. Example sentence: "I feel blogbligated to go back and write about a few of my recent road trips." Now that I've got my first week of classes out of the way I can afford a little blog time.

In reverse chronological order:

Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes:
All summer long I kept getting Facebook invites from my friends back in Ann Arbor to go on camping trips to Sleeping Bear in Northern Michigan, but I had to decline because I was off in Brazil or New York. I can't complain because I was off doing cool things, but after a while I started to get pretty sad that I was missing out on fun activities back home, and Sleeping Bear sounded especially cool. So despite my exhaustion from several months of non-stop travel this summer, I couldn't turn down a trip to the sand dunes last weekend.

I went with Maggie, who is miraculously not sick of traveling with me after three weeks together in Brazil, and her friends Carrie and Eduardo, the latter hailing from Araçatuba, Brazil, which is not terribly far from Campinas. We eschewed the whole camping thing in favor of the Traverse City Super 8, which was fine by me. The dunes were as cool as advertised, and we took a monster hike up and down huge sand-covered hills that eventually dumped us out on the beach. Lake Michigan is incredibly beautiful, clean, and clear, and we spent a couple hours chillin' at the beach.


New England Resort Town Tour with the 'Rents:
My parents came out to see me in Così, but they flew in and out of Boston because they got a killer deal. After the first weekend of performances I had four days off, so I drove out and met up with them in Cape Cod, and we gradually made our way back to Cambridge, New York. I found it funny that most of the places I went with my parents in that span were all resort locations: Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, Newport R.I., Lake George, Saratoga Springs.

Highlights of the trip included a trip to the "summer cottages" of the 19th century's mega-rich in Newport, Rhode Island. Although they referred to them cottages, they had a lot more in common with palaces like Versailles. Here are my parents, dwarfed before the gates of The Breakers, owned by the railroad tycoons of the Vanderbilt family:
We also went to Bolton Landing on Lake George in New York, where my great-great-great-great-grandfather John Tanner lived before meeting the Mormon missionaries in the early 1830s. We were able to see his original house, which has been turned into a bed-and-breakfast. However, judging by the amount of cobwebs we could see inside as we peered through the window, I'd say it isn't really in operation any more. We also tramped through the woods a little bit and found a stream where John Tanner, his whole family, and dozens of others where baptized as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The site is known as Mormon Rock, and a few years ago some of my distant relatives paid to erect a marker there:
New York City, Take Two:
I went to New York City for the first time last year as part of an insane East coast road trip. I was only in the city for about 20 hours, and I did not come away with much fondness for the city. On that trip I went to a small gathering with some friends in midtown Manhattan, and they spent the last 20 years living in an apartment about half the size of my place for about $2,000 a month, and all they could say is how much they loved it and what a steal it was. I seriously felt like they had been brainwashed. As I walked the streets, I didn't get a sense that anyone actually lived there or belonged to a community at all - it was a city full of strangers zooming around at maximum speed. To me it seemed like the city was an elaborate joke that was being played on its residents, tricking them into thinking they were privileged to pay a fortune for their little cages.

But this summer I decided to give New York another chance, so on a day off I took the two hour drive + two hour train ride down into the city. I went straight to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (which was closed on my previous trip) and spent a couple hours there. Then I decided to spend the rest of my day seeing a different side of the city, so I went down to Greenwich Village, Chinatown, and Little Italy. Going to these three places completely changed my mind about New York. These felt like real neighborhoods with real people living in them with a real sense of community, and it was really exhilarating to be there.

I headed back to Times Square on my way back to Grand Central Station, and I was there as Michael Phelps swam for his sixth gold medal. It was so incredible - as soon as his race started, all of Times Square just stopped and looked up at the giant screens. The collective anticipation and national pride was incredible. When he won the race handily, everyone in the crowd went crazy. It was truly unforgettable.

Now that I've fulfilled my blogbligation I'm feeling a lot less blogshausted .