It surely did feel good to sleep in my own bed last night…
After spending the morning catching up on work emails, I used the last day of vacation spending family time on a few of our favorite activities: eating homemade pancakes (banana-chocolate chip) and fruit-picking at wonderful Phillips Farm in Milford, New Jersey.
I have a few postscripts to add to my travelog of our family trip, but first I want to say that the Garden State can be as beautiful and fascinating as any other state in this beautiful and fascinating country.
So here are some final random thoughts and observations post-vacation:
- I learned that while we were away Oreo the Cat pooped twice on the sage-colored dining room carpet. This surely was an act of protest at our absence and somehow bizarrely reminded me of certain protests staged on College Green during my college years.
- This trip was mapped out in haste with the assistance of the local AAA office and TripAdvisor online. I booked hotels in the both the Marriott and the Holiday Inn “family” of hotels, partly because I am a Priority Club Card Member and partly because we had a substantial Marriott travel gift card.
- Although the Marriott hotels in Charleston and Aventura were more luxurious, the Staybridge Suites and the Holiday Inn Express we stayed at in Tampa and in Savannah were far cleaner and more family-friendly. The staff at both of these hotels were far more helpful and gracious and the services and amenities they offered, including the extensive breakfast buffets, were much more appealing to us. I would happily return to both for another stay. Slightly shabby chic, no matter how dazzling on the surface, is not worth the price of a return visit in my book.
- Reading customer reviews on TripAdvisor was especially helpful in planning out the trip. The reviews were very accurate and reflected the highs and the occasional lows of our stays at each hotel. I plan to add my own reviews. We also used TripAdvisor to choose restaurants and map out activities once we arrived in each city, and that was also tremendously helpful in making successful plans.
- Seeing is believing, especially when it comes to teenagers. I was hopeful that touring a potential college campus would motivate Jeff in all kinds of hoped-for ways and it has.
- A little space and planning goes a long way. Small gestures, like packing each boy a separate snack bag for the long car rides and bringing pillows and blankets—and, admittedly, the DS and iPhone—made for happy riders and fewer instances of bored bickering. Which meant…
- Eddie was a happy driver, listening mostly interruption-free to local news and endless (endless!) football and Olympics reportage. Which meant…
- I got to READ. A lot! Novels! And so, to get a long jump on the reading for my fall fiction class, I read (or reread) the following from the syllabus: Jane Eyre, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Thomas Harris’s Silence of the Lambs, and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. I know this is a strange and scary assortment, and I am astonished to say that while I just loathed the idea of reading it, Silence was my favorite read. What deft and precise writing!
Forgive me for admitting this, but Jane Eyre still got on my nerves—just not my cup of tea. I used to refer to this novel as Jane Hair to annoy my youngest sisters, who like such romance. And as for the weird and overbearing Rochester and St. John Rivers: Double Blech.- I also admit to reading the entire trilogy of a popular series, mostly to gain a sense of what’s so appealing about it to so many female readers, but that’s as far as I’ll go. I have enough of a writer’s ego not to want to admit the title of these books. REPETITIVE and BORING. I guess I’m really just nothing of a romantic…
- While this was the most aggravation-free family trip we’ve ever taken, there were nevertheless several times while speeding along some southern interstate I was tempted to take the DS and chuck it out window…
- Finally, I am something of a hermit, by nature, by circumstance, and by profession. It felt good—really good—to get out of my house and out of my head and onto the highway. There’s nothing like sipping white wine by a rooftop pool in the misty Savannah, Georgia, twilight in the midst of people you love and friendly strangers to put everything you are and everything you are going through into broad perspective. It’s hard for me to admit this, and I don’t think I could have done so ten short and long days ago.
p.s. By request I’ll be making a blueberry tart tonight. And maybe next a lemon-raspberry pound cake. And then pesto—lots of pesto. And in a few sweet days, a ripe and juicy freestone peach pie…
p.p.s. Go Ravens!
No bosom-heaving romances for me either, Felicia! As revolting as Silence of the Lambs is, it is more skillful writing.
Colorado Susan
I thought a lot about this on the road, Susan, and while I am repelled by the bosom-heaving and bossy lovers and wilting at rainstorms, etc., I think what I am simultaneously attracted to is the precise and detailed eye of the writer who does not look away from the hard and sometimes ugly realities of life. In Silence the chapter that describes the death of Jack Crawford’s wife brought me to tears. There is such fearsome beauty and power in that style of writing. I felt this way too, awestruck really, reading “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, which describes what happens when one soldier, Mark Fossie, brings his blond and innocent girlfriend, Mary Anne, to Vietnam. I couldn’t breathe while I was reading it.
HOWEVER, you do know that to say we are not fans of Jane Eyre is literary sacrilege…
A perfect postscript to your vacation. Gee I wonder what series of books you are talking about.
If only I could stomach reading in a moving car…maybe audio books!
If you loved and were terrified by “Silence of the Lambs,” as did and was I, you would also love Harris’ prequel, “Red Dragon,” so fabulously written as to actually make you feel sorry for Hannibal Lecter once you found out how he was raised.
Beanne on Books!
Yes, I am so intrigued I want to read the prequel.
Felicia
I am truly devastated by your review of Jane Eyre – it is NOT about heaving bodices at all! In fact, it is her personal growth and indomitable spirit that I have always loved – Rochester is just a conduit (albeit a damn sexy one) for her individual development. It he who needs her far more than she:
“Do you think I am an automaton? — a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! — I have as much soul as you — and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal — as we are!”
and
“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you.”
and
“I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.”
Enough. I MUST know what trilogy you are talking about! It can’t be THOSE books can it??? I confess I read the first two and literally couldn’t get through the third, they were sooooo bad.
I loved “Dracula” – much scarier than any movie. And I am intrigued by your descriptions to read “Silence” and “The Things They Carried.”
Hi Fran–
I knew you would be upset about my review of Jane Eyre. With your permission, I’d like to take your comment here and add it to a new post and open up a discussion about this.
I don’t dispute your characterization of Jane, by the way. And your assessment of her growth I believe is correct.
As for the triology, I don’t name names, honey. But you know what you know, right? And why do we sometimes read what’s bad, hoping against hope to find the good?
Dracula is a masterpiece in the development of the sense of dread. The few scenes of real horror were thereby all the more haunting and terrifying. Just the image of Dracula climbing up and down the side of the walls of the castle plagued me.
I have heard from a few people how much they were struck by the quality of the writing in Silence of the Lambs and The Things They Carried. I think you and Joe would both like the latter.
I owe you an reply email, by the way, on getting together and your next post.
Felicia
p.s. Rochester is not sexy.
Yes, please open it up for discussion – I look forward to it!
I read Dracula last summer and I had the same reaction to his climbing those walls. But, it is this that really haunts me:
“Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot?”
P.S. Rochester is sexy because he is arrogant and proud and brought to his knees by simple, plain Jane.
“The Things They Carried” has a place in the queue.