Top Five: Most Restful Places

I've been to a fair amount of places and seen a fair amount of things. Over the years I've collected a few favorites. 

Here are my top five restful places, places that feel relaxing, and restorative:

1. Crane Beach, Barbados

With its pink coral-sand beaches and happy situation in the ocean (half of the island is windward and half is leeward, meaning half of the island has beaches with waves and half is mostly calm), Barbados is one of my favorite islands. On it's windward side, a special beach has captured my heart. There's just something so peaceful, so serene, so away from everything. Indeed, Crane beach feels as though it's perched on the very edge of the world.

Atop the rugged cliffs at The Crane sits The Crane Resort, a beautiful, old hotel (which recently has undergone major expansions and renovations, which are gorgeous!), which I cannot recommend highly enough!

2. Sundance Resort

There are a few things I like about Utah. Moab. Zion National Park. Hiking. Cafe Rio. And Sundance. If you need a relaxing state-side summer getaway, check out Sundance. Hiking trails in abundance, yummy eats, a beautifully manicured grassy knolls beneath tall pines and a great spa all make this place a great place to tune-out. If you like to Ski, go in the winter. Sundance's ski mountain isn't very large and it's fairly low in elevation, but several other world-class ski resorts are just a half-hour's drive further up the mountain. Check out my faves, Park City, Deer Valley and Brighton.

3. The Decks of any Cruise Ship

Anchored off the coast of Maui aboard Island Princess

Forward, Aft, port or starboard, there is nothing like being at sea on a warm day, surrounding by nothing but the big blue and a light breeze. A deck chair and a book are all you'll need to, as Princess Cruises says, Escape Completely...

4. Sawa Beach Camp, Red Sea, Egypt

Basic as basic comes, Sawa Beach camp is located on the Egyptian portion of the Red Sea and it is divine! Small huts built on cement slabs with palm roofs, each hut has a mosquito-enclosed mattress and a porch with a hammock. Communal bathrooms offer solar-heated water. A large common area for gathering and a restaurant. This piece of sea-front property will knock your socks off. Tip: Have the restaurant set up dinner for you on the beach. Perfection!

5. The Farm. 

This is last on my list only because, well, it's my family's and unless you're a relative or good friend, you probably won't ever visit my Gram's farm.

Snapshots from Virginia: Lazing around the Yard

Nearly ripe blackberries.

Miss spider on her spindly web.

My favorite spot in the woods.

Bush Beautiful and the Monarch.

Snapshots from Virginia: Farm Life

A thunderstorm moving in.

Wheat crop ready for harvest.

Sprouting soy plants as far as the trees.

Snapshots from Virginia: Summer Rain in Williamsburg

A sudden summer rainstorm on a humid, early summer afternoon. 

A quick run for cover. Soaked clothing.

Steamy pavement as the world dries in the heat of the day.

Snapshots from Virginia: Down the Nottoway

Cousins in a canoe.

Families of Geese floating with their young. 

Mama goose taking flight.

Enjoying Every Moment in Virginia

Today was a typically slow day in VA. I slept until my body woke itself, which is a joy that only grownups with jobs and responsibilities can understand the true magnitude of.

After a lesiurely breakfast of honey-toast, yogurt and a massive slab of fresh watermelon, I walked barefoot across the morning-dew-damp grassy yard to the treeline and lay down in the hammock with a good book. Hours passed while wrapped up in the intricacies of that story, and soon enough, after a drive into town for some groceries, the evening rolled in and the family gathered from various corners of the countryside for a meal of grilled steaks and mashed potatoes, laughing and joking all the while. Just as the steaks were pulled off the grill, the winds kicked up, blowing a fast-moving front of grey thunderclouds overhead, pouring sheets of warm rain and lightning over the house and wheat fields.

After the last bite had been finished and bedtime stories read to the children and the adults tucked themselves into the living room to chat, the rain retreated over the tree line. Lightning flashes trailed sporadically in the growing distance. The lightning bugs in the yard and wheat field glowed happily in an echoing response to the storm's shows of retreating radiance.

And then suddenly, all that was left was the nearly full moon, glowing over white, fluffy clouds. A freshly glistening yard and field of damp wheat, nearly ready for harvest, and an almost deafening chorus of happily chirping bullfrogs sounding just beyond the trees.

Faraway Fantasy Friday: The Farm!

If you've followed my blog for a while, you probably know that I've got a Grandmother in Virginia. She lives waaaaaaaay out in the country on a farm. I go there about once a year and dig my toes into the sand, do some planting and weeding and riding and relaxing and driving around country back roads in a little pickup with the windows rolled down. It's a little slice of heaven, or as my Grandfather used to call it, God's little green acres.

I'm headed out to the farm tomorrow and I've been daydreaming of being there for weeks. Back to the sweet, thick, southern heat and my people. Back home.

Where do you want to be today?

Shark's Teeth, Blueberries, Car-jumping Daredevils and One Fabulous Auntie

My Auntie-Mama Rene is one of my favorite people in the world. She's my Mother's sister. The same amazing Woman I went caneoing down the Nottaway river with last year (and got locked out of the truck at the end). She spent a few years as a Truck Driver and now really has no desire to go anywhere outside of her normal country home places. She explores the area, bit by bit. She digs in the earth for Indian artifacts - arrowheads, pottery and the like (and finds it all in droves, too!) and sifts the river bed for shark's teeth. She explores, in her own way, God's green earth. Everything is a delicate gift, a discovery to her, from sighting an Eagle lazing over the river to holding a baby box turtle.

I think my urge to discover, the way I go about it, comes from her, from my earliest exposures to her as a child.

I remember being about six years old. My mother had brought me and my sister to Gram's farm for the summer. Rene took us on many excursions that summer. To the flower fields to pick daisies. To the berry patch to pick strawberries and blackberries. To spots deep in the woods to dig for arrowheads (I saw a sleeping snake in a pit out there!).

One sunny afternoon Rene drove us down a long backroad to go pick wild blueberries. The road was white sand and it was beautiful. We drove along, verrrrrrrrrrry slowly, just creeping along, as country people who are just enjoying the day do. My little sister was three years old and pretty much followed me around wherever I suggested. I was impatient to get to wherever we were going, as six year olds are. Finally I just couldn't take it anymore. The sand on the road was so very lovely and just begged to be played in. What's more, there were millions of blueberry plants all around us.

I was the devil. I whispered to my sister to unbuckle her seatbelt, grabbed her hand, opened the door of the car and we both hopped out with our buckets. The car was practically rolling along at a Turtle's pace, just mozying really, while Auntie and Mom gabbed away in the front seat.

Kelly and I were ecstatic that we'd escaped the slowly rolling gossip-mobile and immediately began to roll around in the beautiful white-sugary sand road. It didn't take long for the car to come to a screeching stop and Mama and Auntie to jump out, pale-faced.

I don't remember getting in trouble. I do remember the sand. I remember picking blueberries the rest of the afternoon. That was my first daredevil-escape-artist act. It wasn't my last. But I'm not an adrenaline junkie by any means either. However, the impression it left on my three-year old sister must have been something,  because she is. She's the bungee-jumping, skydiving type. And it's probably my fault.

Now I'm Thirty. Auntie-Mama is a couple decades older. And as I look at her I see that I'm now in the position she once was. To teach, to guide the babies around me. I'm happy to have my Nephew around so I can help him learn and explore.

Everytime I go back to Virginia, Rene teaches me something new about looking and finding and searching, about taking long walks and soul-whisperings and planting strawberries (and running over them with a tractor), about family and being neighborly and taking care of the people in your life.

Thanks Auntie-Mama for the continued inspiration you give me, for all you still teach me. I love you.

 This is a Florida backroad, but it's a white-sandy backroad all the same, just so you can see what I'm talking about.

The Westover Plantation

My little sister is going to hate me for this post. You see, her last name is Westover. And she wasn't with me when I visited the plantation... Oh well.

While I was down home on the farm in Virginia, I had one day of exploration in mind. I wanted to go back to the James River plantations and explore some more. This time I invited my lovely auntie-mama Rene along. We set off in the morning and drove an hour Southeast from Gram's farm down to the mighty James, the selfsame river that meets the Atlantic and was the gateway for the first British colonizers to the Americas.

The Westover Plantation is one of the oldest plantations established along the James (the oldest being Berkeley - more on Berkeley later). It was built in 1730 by William Byrd II, the founder of the city of Richmond. It was named after Lord Henry West, son of the Governor of Virginia.

The house proper is not open to the public to tour, but the grounds can be toured and are GORGEOUS. I can safely say that of all the Plantation homes I've toured along the James, Westover is my absolute favorite. It is the most happily situated house I have ever laid eyes on.

On the property there are grand gardens to explore, a plantation-style house, kitchen and other out-buildings from long past days, including a "necessary", an ice house and an old root cellar that used to be part of an old secret passage system to provide escape during Indian attack. (Yes, seriously!) I may have climbed down the ladder into the old passage...

An old cabinet in the kitchen

 A spinning wheel in the kitchen

 Gardens

 Details from the front gate

 GORGEOUS old Magnolia tree

 The front entry to the house - this is a famous doorway, known as the Westover doorway.

 One of the "wings" to the house - a beautiful little solarium-style walkway between the house proper and the side buildings. The winged walkways were added in the 1900's.

 The ladder in the root cellar leading down to the "secret passage"

 Happily looking out onto the James River.

My Grandma’s Garden is Bigger Than Your Backyard

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On a working farm there are two businesses run simultaneously: the business of farming and the business of living.

The modern farmer plants crops in large, cleared fields with heavy machinery, tends them with more machinery and harvests them with even more machinery. The crops that are planted each year vary according to market price, and the farmer gambles each season by planting what he or she thinks will fetch the best price. Sometimes crops fail. Sometimes the market changes before harvest. Sometimes it all works out.

Nearly every farm you see will have a garden as well as crop fields. Not a city-style garden, all trim with lattices and Tomato wires and stakes for creeping plants to grow up. But a large plot, usually plowed over by the same tractor the farmer uses on the fields, planted full of good things: Corn, Broccoli, Kale, Spinach, Tomato, Dill, Cucumber, Cabbage, Onions, String beans, Butter beans… use your imagination. It’s big enough to feed the family from all year. (Of course, these days country gardens are supplemented by trips to Wal-Mart, but everyone knows there’s just nothing like farm fresh.)

This morning I stood barefoot in the garden, working beside my grandmother. She picked baby spinach leaves and fresh kale (it's spicy! who knew?) for our supper this evening (and also to thin out the plants so they’ll continue to produce) while I hoed weeds.  I listen to my tiny, white-haired Grandmother hum in her high pitched, slightly off-key tone, the tone I’ve grown to love over the years, she hums to the vegetables and talks to them, interrogating the weeds in her garden bed. “What do we have here? Just what are you?” And then her deft, sweetly gnarled hands reach quickly down and futz with the invading plant, pull it up and toss it aside as she moves on down the garden row.

My neatly kept, mulch covered garden back in California doesn’t compare in either size or quality - with the amazing produce Grandma will pick in the summer months. The clay dirt in California is tough and hard to work with compared to the loose sandy loam in Virginia. It seems that here on the east coast all you need to do is stick something in the ground and it will grow. Back in California I fight with the earth, condition it, add eggshells to it, water daily and fertilize it weekly to coax tomatoes out of the ground. In Virginia, Grandma fertilizes once with cow manure and then nature does the rest. No watering. No conditioning. At the end of the summer Grandma and everyone else will have picked all they want, eaten all they can hold, canned all they can store, and traded a surplus of one thing on one farm for a surplus of another on a different farm. At the end of summer, vegetables will rot on the plants in Grandma’s garden. And then the large tractor will come again and turn it all under the earth to compost and get ready for next spring.

That’s just the way of it.

Hmm. The mason jar I’m drinking ice water out of tastes briny, of pickles. Guess I know what Grandma canned last year. 

Tastes like home. 

I am blessed.

Yay for May!

Well, I've planned a week-long trip for May.

I thank travel-hacking for this one. I've booked a $5 flight on JetBlue. (Thank you for the Thank You points, Jet Blue Airlines Credit Card special!)

I'll be flying to DC and then renting a car (in this case, more cost-effective than flying direct) and driving down to Virginia (about 3.5 hours) to my Grandmother's farm.
AKA: One of my favorite relaxation havens.

And, all-in-all, an extremely cost-effective holiday! And super relaxing. I'm very excited to be starting and ending in DC too, so I can revisit the Capitol and maybe do some sightseeing before heading home.

You see, once I hit the backwood roads leading to Gram's farm,

I tend to turn into a country bumpkin, not wanting to do anything but kick off my shoes, roll up my pant legs and go tromping through the dirt, enjoying the sunshine and my family.

So flying in and out of DC will force me to do a tiny bit more on this trip. No doubt I'll let you know if this turns out to really be a good idea or not.

Here's to home-cooked Southern farm food, good clean dirt and a sweet, humid spring on the farm.

Where's your relaxation haven?

The Shirley Plantation

America is quite a young country, as far as countries go. I mean, Italy dates back to the 8th Century, BC, for pete's sake, if you count the Romans. America, a fledgling 200+ years old, by contrast is just a wee little thing.

So our ammassment of historical places is a bit thin.

And mostly on the East coast. Because, Philly, DC and VA are pretty much where everything got started for us Americans.

In contrast with my wily youthful days, I now really enjoy historical tours of places. (Especially things of ancient Roman historical value... but I digress)

Being that my Grandmother lives in Virginia, one of the history-rich places in the US, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to do a bit of exploring on my last trip out there. As a child, I spent some wonderful summers in Virginia with my siblings and Mother. It was always inevitable that Mother would need to leave the farm at some point, after all, contrasting city life with country life is sometimes an unsettling thing and may leave even the mellowest city-folk a bit bored. So Mother would take us to tour battlegrounds in Petersburg and War Museums in Richmond and the Capitol in Washington, DC. We went to the Smithsonian and the Whitehouse and learned about General Lee and Pocahontas. It was all... very memorable and at the same time, quite boring for me as a child/teen. I would have rather been playing in the sweet Viriginia mud and rivers than face those long car rides and arduous, monotonous tours... But anyway, I do remember that they weren't always boring. Or rather, I remember my Mother's excitement for the subject matter. Her eyes would open wide and she would tell us about those historical sights in hushed, fervent whispers and ask us what we thought about them. Her excitement was what made the trips bearable.

So now that I understand that excitement for things ancient, or in the states, newly decrepit, I feel that excitement myself as I explore. So one day during my visit to Grandma's farm, I hopped in my favorite little gold Ford Ranger (my car of choice for driving down Virginia back roads with the windows down) and hit the road. Down the backroads and out to the freeway I went. Around Richmond and off toward Colonial Williamsburg.

On my way, I noticed signs for a place called the Shirley Plantation. And then signs for the Virginia Plantations. And I knew I would not be getting to Colonial Williamsburg straightaway. And it was a good choice.

A bit of background from Wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Plantation):
"Shirley Plantation is an estate located on the north bank of the James River in Charles City County, Virginia. It is located on State Route 5, a scenic byway which runs between the independent cities of Richmond and Williamsburg. Shirley Plantation is the oldest active plantation in Virginia and is one of the oldest family-owned businesses in North America, dating back to 1614 with operations starting in 1638.^[3] The plantation was added to the National Register on 1969-10-01 and declared a National Historic Landmark on 1970-04-15.
The lands of Shirley Plantation were first settled in 1613 by Sir Thomas West, 3rd Baron De la WarrHundred. The land was cultivated for growing tobacco to be shipped around the colonies and England."

 
 1613!!

The LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG Drive up to the Plantation... through 5,000 acres.

 The Residence

 One of the workhouses - for processing Cotton

 Smokehouse