That old Frank Sinatra tune has been playing in my head since I landed at O’Hare Tuesday night — which is not really a bad thing. (It could be worse, right? Like a Justin Bieber ear worm?)
How can you help singing when the view from your hotel window looks like this?
There’s no shame in being a total tourist when visiting a new city, and I had hoped to get some big time sightseeing in yesterday, but that was not to be. Between the MOMocrats’ regularly scheduled Wednesday podcast and my sister’s business dealings, we were unable to meander too far away from our temporary home at the Chicago Sheraton and Towers.
Fortunately, we’re in a prime location, with easy walking to the Magnificent Mile — fabulous shopping and restaurants on Michigan Avenue, not to mention the absolutely gorgeous buildings I was clued in to by friends who have lived here.
My sister had already been here for several days, having attended another convention that concluded just as BlogHer was starting. So she already knew where we were going to have lunch: a trendy, noisy, foodie spot called the Purple Pig.
It was an excellent choice: We each had salads (hers was a classic wedge with slices of heirloom tomatoes; mine a stack of heirloom carrots, shaved fennel and avocado) and split a dish made of fresh peas, mint and bacon. Not quite vegetarian, but light, fresh and delicious.
Of course, as this was the eve of BlogHer, there were plenty of old friends to catch up with in the hotel lobby. On top of that, the hotel held a happy hour event called Sheraton Social Hour: A Taste of Chicago, co-hosted by Wine Spectator magazine. This was basically an all-you-can-drink buffet of truly excellent Oregon and Washington state wines, paired with yummy appetizers.
This had the effect of loosening people up, and even though I’m naturally kind of reticent and shy with crowds of new people, we found ourselves making new blogging friends — which is what this event is all about
Today, I will be learning some new photo and video-making tricks at the BlogHer Viewfinder event. I have always done some form of live blogging here and will likely attempt that again (despite the challenges of my iPad’s virtual keyboard). I’ll keep you posted.
Dec. 1991: The Norman Keep and me. At Cardiff Castle.
Dec. 1991: Upon landing at Heathrow, we took the Tube so I could get my first glimpse of Buckingham Palace before going on to Wales.
I recently became a member of the Generation Fabulous group of midlife bloggers, which runs a monthly bloghop. This month’s topic is “Transformative Travel.”
I rarely went anywhere in my 20s and early 30s. I was too focused then on trying to stay employed in the entertainment industry… and looking for love in all the wrong places.
And then: I finally found it, with someone who was here on a student visa. And a few years later, I found myself on a plane to London so I could meet his family.
It was Christmas, and as a lifelong Californian, I expected to be cold. That frightened me.
“I’m kind of a hothouse flower,” I reminded him.
But you know what? Weather conditions that would keep me indoors here in Los Angeles didn’t phase me in the United Kingdom. OK, there was that one outing on the top of Caerphilly Mountain that brought tears to my eyes that I swore at the time were frozen — but I discovered that I could handle freezing temperatures, rainy weather and cold, blustery wind just fine… so long as I was experiencing them anywhere but California.
Dec. 1991: The Norman Keep and me. At Cardiff Castle.
That trip taught me a few other lessons:
That my American accent was just as incomprehensible to my future in-laws as theirs was to me.
That the United States and Britain are indeed two countries separated by a common language. (Helpful tip: Do not put “salad cream” on your salad — unless you want said salad to taste like cole slaw.)
That socialized medicine is a beautiful thing in action. (Both of my husband’s parents ended up in the hospital – for separate ailments – over my two weeks in Britain on that first trip. And the care they received was impressive. With no scary bills to pay.)
That I love to travel.
I love seeing new places, trying new foods, learning new histories, taking photographs (prior to that trip, I did not even own a camera). And as the years have passed and we married and became a family, this love is something we shared with our daughter. She made her first trip to meet her British grandparents when she was just four months old and we visited as often as our budget would allow — until the economy crashed. By then, my father-in-law had passed away. We could have saved a lot of money by staying home, but I’m proud that our girl has a relationship with her cousins and wonderful memories of her grandpa.
She has also been to big cities like New York and Paris and natural wonders like Yosemite and Alaska’s Glacier Park. And I know she won’t wait until her mid-thirties to get out of her comfort zone and see the world outside Los Angeles. Because we are a family of travelers.
My youngest niece graduated from high school last week, and so we packed up our things and drove up to Sacramento to celebrate — just as we did when her older brother and sister reached that milestone.
But this year, we did something different: we stayed a while. My sister and I have been trying to arrange a couples’ trip up to Mendocino for the longest time, but between the restraints of work and school, it’s been hard to coordinate. With the start of summer and all of us in the same place, we were finally able to make that happen.
And as it’s just silly to rush back home so you can get back to work mid-week, we extended our holiday until Friday, and made a pit stop in one of our state’s natural wonders: Yosemite National Park.
It was our first real vacation – not just an extended weekend – in three years.
As you all know, I’m not the outdoors type – but I still found plenty of ways to enjoy the beauty of Yosemite, including a morning art class that had me wielding a paintbrush for the first time since I was a kid. The resulting watercolor wasn’t great – but it didn’t totally suck, either. And I got in touch with a part of myself that’s been dormant for a long, long time.
My first attempt at painting in something like 40 years.
In fact, I think just the fact of being on vacation – without the usual workday stress – allowed each of us to be our authentic selves again. You know, the people we were before we became parents and homeowners and had to act like responsible adults. For one week, we were relaxed. For one week, we weren’t bickering with one another. For one week, I felt at peace.
Now that I am back, I am trying to figure out how to hold on to that authentic self I got to meet again while on vacation. I may make some time to do more painting, if only for myself.
And start planning my next vacation. Hopefully, I won’t have to wait as long.
I was one of the lucky ones. I only had to wait about twenty minutes before the computer system went back online. I checked myself in to my 3:25 pm flight and stood in line to get my back checked.
Unfortunately, the system was busy printing out bag tags for hundreds of other people who had checked in prior to the system outage. And most of those people were on a Dallas-Fort Worth flight that had already been canceled. People were not happy. I decided that getting angry at the situation would not help.
Air travel these days requires patience, I told myself. And a sense of humor. After what happened in Boston on Monday, I expected security delays at the airports. Boston was a tragedy. This was just a nuisance. I stayed calm.
“Your flight to LAX is still on,” I was assured by the poor ticket clerk who was dealing alone with angry passengers and the backlog of luggage tags.
My own tag eventually spooled out of the printer. He placed it on my bag and instructed me to put it on the belt and I headed downstairs to the TSA checkpoint.
According to my boarding pass, I had just 10 minutes to get to my gate. I wasn’t going to make it. But I figured I wasn’t the only one, so I stayed fairly calm (mostly fixating on the fact that I was hungry and wouldn’t have time to grab any lunch before my flight). By the time I got to the gate, it was 10 minutes past my scheduled flight — which was OK, because it had been delayed until 5:00 (I was trying so hard to get there on time that I didn’t think to stop and check the flight schedule board).
So now, I had time for lunch. Hooray. I bought a sandwich, found a seat near the gate and settled in.
There was a long line of people at my gate. I wondered if there was some kind of additional check-in procedure for this flight. I asked one of the women in the queue. “We’re all trying to reschedule our flight to Dallas from this morning,” she told me. She had a toddler with her. They were not happy campers. I felt bad for them and grateful that my flight was merely delayed a couple of hours.
Five o’clock came and went. I stayed calm.
At 5:15, the airline announced that our plane had arrived. “We just need to get these passengers off, clean it out and then we’ll get you all to Los Angeles,” they said.
At 6:00 they let us know that they were waiting for one more member of the flight crew to arrive.
I texted my husband and daughter updates on my flight status. My original plan — when I was landing in the middle of rush hour — was to take the Flyaway and get picked up by one of them in Van Nuys around 6:00. Now that I’ll be landing around 8:00, I might be able to get my husband to pick me up at LAX, I thought.
Twenty minutes later, a notification from my Tripcase app flashed on my iPad. It said that my flight was now canceled, but the info board at the gate listed it as going out at 6:30. I got into the line behind the last two remaining Dallas folks — and was in position when American finally announced that my LAX flight was canceled.
“We can get you on a United flight that’s going out at 10:00,” the airline rep said. That meant I wouldn’t get back home until after midnight. Not ideal, but I was happy to take it. By now, all I wanted was to get home. There was just one problem.
“I checked my luggage. Do I need to go somewhere to get it?”
“No, we will move it over to United for you. You just need to check in to your flight over there,” she said. She handed me a meal voucher and my original boarding pass from American. The receipt from my luggage tag was stuck to the back of it. “You’ll need this to get your bag,” she said.
At the United desk, I asked again about my checked luggage. “Is it going to make it on to the plane?” I asked. I was assured that it would.
You know how this story ends, don’t you? The flight to LAX went smoothly and arrived 20 minutes ahead of schedule. I made my way to baggage claim, where a clerk was arranging bags from another flight.
“Are these the ones from Denver?” I asked.
She told me I had to wait.
So I waited.
And waited.
I was nodding off against a column when she called me. “Are you waiting for someone from Denver?” she asked.
I told her I was on the flight from Denver and was waiting for my bag. She shook her head. “I thought you were waiting for a passenger,” she said. “We got all the bags from that flight. We’re done.” She looked at my tag from American.
“Your bag is not lost,” she said.
I was tired. I wanted to cry. “It’s not here, so it kind of is,” I whined.
“The problem is, because the computers were down, your bag never got scanned. It has to be matched with your name manually. It’s probably still with American. You can either make a claim to have it traced here, or go over there to look for it.”
It was now 12:30 in the morning and the last thing I wanted to do was march across LAX to the American terminal. Besides, if I wasn’t able to fly to LAX on my canceled American flight, how could my bag have made it here?
I made the claim at United. “They’ll find your bag and deliver it to your house tomorrow,” she assured me. “And you can trace it on our website here.”
As of this writing, it is nearly lunchtime. And so far, the United website is reporting that “the tracing process is continuing” and I should check back later.
I wish this was the end of my pitiful tale — but it’s not. While I was eating my dinner alone in the United terminal last night, I arranged for Super Shuttle to take me home. The van I ordered did not arrive until nearly 1:00 A.M. And on the ride, I noticed that my battery was running low. I turned the phone off and placed it back in my computer bag. Or so I thought. Because once I was finally home and had access to a charger, I could not find it.
One of the traits I really hate in myself is absent mindedness. It gets worse when I’m tired, as I was last night. I waste a lot of time trying to locate things I’ve misplaced. I spent an hour this morning trying to reach Super Shuttle’s Lost and Found.
So far, my phone is in the same boat as my lost luggage.
At least, I made it home all right. And after I get a little more sleep, my sense of humor may return.
Why am I posting old photos of Cardiff and London today?
Because today marks NINE years of writing SoCal Mom! The launch of this new site is one way I’m commemorating my “blogiversary,” especially as I speed to to the decade mark. (What do you get a blogger for her tenth blogiversary? You have a year to figure it out!)
Over the next year, I’ll be highlighting some of the better posts I’ve written over most of the last decade — especially those you are likely to have missed. (Want to see that first post? It’s still over at Typepad.) I think I was a better writer then. There were no rules every blogger HAD to follow. I never expected anyone other than friends and family to read my blog, so there was no pressure to do any SEO. And nobody I knew even understood what a blog was – let alone companies, PR people, marketers. There was no Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr or any other social media platform to distract me from doing what I wanted to do: write an honest account of what I was experiencing at the time.
I started blogging in December 2003 to share one of our family vacations in the UK – which included a brief fling in Paris (my first — and so far, only time there).
We snapped a ton of photos with our first-ever digital camera (they had only just become affordable then), and upon our return, I created a Typepad “Photo Album.” I put together a number of these until 2005, when I began sharing my photos on Flickr instead. As years went by and my sidebars became more and more crowded, I stopped displaying the photo albums on my home page. So I suppose it’s fitting to make this the first post I’m porting back from the original site.
These are shots taken in my husband’s home town of Cardiff, Wales. Much of what is depicted has changed — especially my husband, my daughter and me.
Tesco Extra
Is it weird that the first thing we do in Cardiff is head to this grocery store to shop?
Gareth and I really love to shop at this supersized supermarket, the first store we’ve seen in Britain that’s open 24 hours. Except on Sunday. Gareth and I joke about it being 24/6. Still, my sis-in-law says this has saved her, because between raising three rambunctious boys and going back to school for her degree, she can shop late at night. At least, they are moving in the right direction.
H Not too many Schwartzes I know celebrate Christmas.
Schwartz Christmas
While shopping in the Tesco SuperCentre, I found this display of Christmas baking items and thought my nice Jewish family would get a kick out of it.
Cardiff Market, established 1892
Cardiff Market
Here’s the the entrance to the more traditional Cardiff Market, one of my favorite places to visit in the City Centre. It reminds me of our own Los Angeles Farmers Market, where my grandmother used to take me for an international lunch… and where Gareth and I often visit now with Megan. The one in L.A. was established in 1934. The one in Cardiff opened over 40 years earlier.
Gareth snapped this shot of the booths (which sell everything from fresh meats, fish & produce to rugs & clothing, etc.) from the second level of the Market (where vendors sell fast breakfasts, lunches & teas — as well as used records, videos, pet supplies and collectibles). Check out the Victorian glass and ironwork ceiling!
View from the second level of Cardiff Market.
The Cornish Bake House
Our favorite spot for Cornish pasties.
No trip to Britain would be complete without a savoring a hot pastie (pronounced “pah-stee”). These are like meat turnovers and were the original bag lunch for the men who used to go off to the coal mines. The Cornish Bake House in Cardiff makes some of the best we’ve ever tasted.
Unfortunately, there’s no seating inside the shop — and our picky little eater refuses to even try them. So we hit upon a great idea: after buying our pasties, we hightailed it over to the nearest McDonald’s, where we purchased a Happy Meal and some nice soft drinks… then went up the stairs to find ourselves a comfy table and chairs. (This McDonald’s was decidedly upscale, with a large-screen TV showing music videos and expensive Internet kiosks.)
Terrace Houses
This is the hood where my husband grew up. Most of these houses were built around the turn of the 20th century.
Home Away from Home
When I first started visiting Cardiff, this was a Lloyd’s Bank. On our last trip, we discovered that it was now a Starbucks! Looks just like the ones in the States, doesn’t it?
One of the nice things about this trip is that after 12 years, I finally feel confident enough to walk to the shops on Albany Road unaccompanied by Gareth. I know that sounds weird, but my instinct when crossing the street is to look in the wrong direction — and pedestrians in the UK do not have the right of way, and motorists will not stop for them!
But I guess I finally licked the fear of becoming roadkill — so this time around, if I awoke before my husband, I didn’t have to sit around and wait for him to go and get a paper — I said good morning to Neil and Marion, walked out the door, bought a couple of papers — and if I really craved a cup of coffee, I stopped off at this Starbucks. (Note: My husband tells me our beloved Starbucks on Wellfield Road is no longer there. I will need to find another spot for coffee the next time we visit.)
Roath Park opened in 1894. This lighthouse was erected in 1912, to commemorate Captain Robert Scott, who embarked on his ill-fated Antarctic expedition from Cardiff.
Check out the Victorian ironwork along the side of this bridge.
We All Scream for Ice Cream – Even when it’s freezing.
I found it amazing that the ice cream truck at the park gets such great business, even on days that just hover above freezing. Then again, I am also perplexed by the fact that the Brits will often drink a steaming cup of tea on a hot summer day (and pronounce it “refreshing”).
No trip to Cardiff would be complete without a visit at Castell Coch, one of three very different old fortresses in the area. However, in Wales, it seems as if you cannot walk 10 blocks without stumbling over the ruins of some old castle.
Help! I’m Trapped!
After Cardiff, we moved east to London for a 24-hour period before we had to catch our flight back to Los Angeles.
That’s where Megan took this shot of Gareth clowning around in a phone box. It was rumored a few years back that these distinctive booths would be discontinued in favor of something more modern. I’m glad that didn’t happen. But I just read in a magazine that BT is converting some of them to Internet kiosks, which would allow people to hook in and check their email. I think that’s a wonderful way to integrate the traditional with modern communication needs. (You can tell this was written before the advent of affordable smartphones!)
There was very little we can afford at Harrod’s (even truer in 2012!), but I’d heard they held a great January sale. Alas, even at 40% off, Dior clothes for kids were still too rich for my blood. They do have fun souvenir items for tourists, and over the years have expanded that department so that it now takes up about half the floor it is on — and we did end up buying a lot to bring back home. The Food Hall is also something that is not to be missed.
Princess Diana Memorial at Harrod’s.
As the signs around Harrod’s expressly forbid photography, we were not able to show you the in-house Starbucks and Krispy Kreme (imagine! at Harrod’s!). But owner Mohammad Al-Fayad has been on a crusade to prove to the world that the deaths of his son Dodi and the Princess were the result of foul play, so a sign next to this memorial announces that photos are allowed here only. Encased in plexiglass in front of the pictures are the wine glasses the couple drank from prior to embarking on that fatal ride, as well as a huge diamond engagement ring that Dodi purportedly was going to give Diana that evening.
Tower Bridge
The Paris leg of that trip included an enjoyable cruise down the Seine, so we decided to repeat the experience in London. Unfortunately, we opted to ride the Thames in the wrong direction, toward Greenwich, which means that the Tower Bridge was the first — and final — famous structure we would see on the voyage. However, all was not lost as we did enjoy visiting Greenwich.
One of the first things you see when you dock at Greenwich is this famous clipper ship, the Cutty Sark.This souvenir shop claims to be the world’s first, thanks to its geographic location.This is the building that housed the observatory in Greenwich. It is no longer used as an observatory, because of all the interference from the lights of London — but it’s still home of Greenwich Mean Time and the Prime Meridian.My husband straddling the Prime Meridian, with a foot in each hemisphere.
