August 2020, Wisconsin/ Michigan
On the Road
Tag: travel
Thoughts in Spanish
I want to write about Mexico.
About what it was like to return somewhere after 22 years and feel like you’d always been there.
I want to write about Mexico, but my thoughts are scattered among mountains, and cactus. They are running rampant with stray dogs along winding roads lined with palm trees and pop up food stands.
How do I make sense of everything that happened in the two weeks that stretched out like an eternity.
Things run slower in the motherland. There is an urgency, and need for immediate gratification that doesn’t exist there. Time has slowed down. Or maybe it’s that time is just running along at the right pace and we’re running too fast in the States?
Either way I came home tired.
And that title is misleading.
My thoughts have always been a jumble that predominantly exists in English. A place where Spanish shows up like a fond friend who’s mostly traveling and cannot be tied down.
No pos guau.
When I close my eyes and think of Mexico all I see is color.
Mexico is the brightest blue sky dotted with fluffy white clouds.
It is dark green mountains rising up towards it.
Red dusty earth.
The golden tan skin of people who rarely have the sun hidden from them.
When I close my eyes and think of Mexico, all I can think of are ghost stories, bygone times, and memories that don’t belong to me.
I think of blood that is a stranger to me and a longing to know who they were.
The family gathered, their aunt had come home. The baby of the family, who’d been away for so long had come back for a visit.
Naturally a pig was slaughtered and there was feasting and drinking and singing.
I watched my cousins clasp her hands and ask her one by one if she remembered them, if she knew their names. She nodded until she was overwhelmed by the amount of people, and questions.
I watched a cousin break down and cry as he tried to reconcile his memory of my mother– strong, vibrant, full of life, with the fragile, quiet, woman that stood in front of him.
I sat with her, holding her hand as the tears slid down her cheeks, for reasons I don’t think she understood.
When I think of this trip, I think of a loved one saying, “goodbye.”
You had me at ‘Baby Gator’
I’m not going to lie, when I pictured myself taking an airboat ride through the Florida Everglades I pictured myself standing at the front of the boat, the wind blowing through my hair, shades on and hands on my hips taking in the scenery like it was no big thing
I also had an image of Horatio from CSI: Miami standing on one in a similar pose floating around in my head and that’s kinda what I was trying to embody..
“Drive by…Miami style.”
In reality I was sitting in the second row from the front on the edge of the boat in a bright sundress.
Sometimes because my eyesight is so bad I would switch from sunglasses to my extra strength prescription glasses to try and get a glimpse of an alligator lurking in the shade of the trees.
This was not the Horatio image of myself I had pictured.
The night I arrived in Miami the concierge handed me a stapled stack of papers with information they thought a tourist might need to know during their stay. Nearby restaurant and entertainment options, map of the surrounding area, special tour options, etc.
Because I was traveling by myself and needed more to do than eat and lay on the beach (which in itself sounds amazing enough) I booked a couple of tours to take up my weekend.
Saturday morning I woke up, dressed and walked to the meeting point for the Everglades tour. I walked right up to the red tour bus, said my name and panicked when the tiny german woman told me my name wasn’t on the list.
I went into the office made a stink about how the concierge made my reservation and Dylan in their office confirmed it and then promptly walked out when they said there was no one by the name of Dylan working in their office.
I freaked out a little more on the sidewalk as I dialed the number given to me by the front desk until someone from the correct tour agency reassured me that the bus driver would be arriving in a few moments to pick me up from where I was currently standing.
The bus pulled up and the doors opened, “Jenny Kastle?” The driver asked
“YES!” I rushed onto the bus and took a seat right behind him.
We chit chatted a bit as we picked up the rest of the people going on the tour. Eddies Torres, from Puerto Rico (don’t hold that against me ) was driving a big bus of tourists from South Beach down the Tamiami trail to look at some gators.
“It’s nice. You’ll like it. They even let you hold an alligator and take a picture with it.” I nearly died from the overwhelming excitement.
I’ll let you in on a little secret, I love alligators. I think they’re absolutely adorable. I don’t know what it is exactly, maybe it’s their wide bodies and their chubby baby legs or something about their sassy walk.
We arrived at the aptly named “Gator Park” and made our way to the dock. I truly realized we were not in Miami anymore, Toto, when I hear the accents of the workers. It’s a strange southern accent that sounds different from all the other southern accents I’d heard before. This wasn’t just the south, this was southern Florida. Gone were the sing songy caribbean accents with their long vowel sounds.
We’re handed ear plugs that we’d need for certain parts of the ride and we climbed aboard.
We headed down the river of grass and kept our eyes open for gators and other critters. The captain told us about the history of the Everglades, about the creatures who lived there and about the indians that used to live on the tiny islands throughout.
At one point to illustrate the shallowness of the water he stopped the boat and dipped his hand in pulling out dirt and leaves from the bottom.
On our way back to the dock we did see a couple of tiny baby alligators sunning themselves on lilypads and it was totally presh.
The rest of the trip was spent in the big hut where another one of the workers introduced us to some of the animals they have there at the park.
We watched as he walked through the crowd with a tiny snapping baby gator in hand and then demonstrated the proper way to wrassle a gator. We watched as he wrestled and subdued a full grown gator named Norman and all lined up happily to take our photo with a younger and smaller alligator whose real name I can’t remember and who I’ve since named Trevor.
It took everything I had within me not to cuddle him a little.
I held a baby gator and was forever changed.
“Is there a time limit for sitting here?”
I gotta say, Florida is beautiful from the plane.
Everything is so green and vibrant. The great big blue expanse of the ocean is stunning instead of mildly terrifying the way it usually is to a girl from the plains who doesn’t know how to swim.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I am not a good flyer. A sad fact I discovered when I took my first flight ever to Mexico with my parents at age 11 and had to be calmed down before even boarding the plane.
Today’s flight was no exception.
Moments after take off, probably around the time we reached “cruising altitude” I started feeling nauseous. I have a sinking suspicion that my nausea might have had only 50% to do with my motion sickness and 50% to do with the huge margarita I chose to drink for breakfast while waiting for my flight.
Isn’t that what you do in an airport?
Drink? Drink and have emotional reunions with loved ones?
Maybe. Maybe not. But that was the choice I made and I have to suffer through it.
I tried to sleep a bit but couldn’t since the cabin, which, overcompensating for the earlier stuffiness, was colder than a Chicago morning in February and due to the cost cuts there were no complimentary blankets for my napping pleasure offered in coach. Is it still called coach?
Ah it’s “economy class.”
It is peasant class.
“Let them freeze. Let them eat cake–but only if they pay for it.”
Unable to sleep I read and drank my complimentary coffee. Neither of these helped my nausea. I made small talk with the nice older lady from Tampa who was one seat away from. Thank God we had that empty seat between. I’m sure this is what kept us friendly.
“Oh my gosh! Why those are actual palm trees arent they?!” I couldn’t help but exclaim with touristic excitement. The nice lady from Tampa just smiled and gave me the same look I give tourists when they say obvious things like “the buildings are so tall here.” Or “The lakefront is so beautiful.” The one that says “Yep. That’s just how it is here. It’s no big.”
Finally the seatbelt sign went off and we all scrambled to grab our things and leave. I said goodbye to the nice lady from Tampa and headed out into the airport, which from what she tells me is “cozy.”
And now I find myself sitting in yet another airport Chili’s killing time and eavesdropping on a table of hilarious middle aged Brits.
It’s no O’hare, but it’ll do for now.
“This is a Blue Line Train to O’hare”
It’s 10 am on a week day and I’m the same train I take to work, only by this time I’m more than an hour late and I’m skipping the second to last stop on this train for the last stop on the line.
I’ve lived all of my life in this city and I’ve never actually taken the train to O’hare with the intention of getting on a plane and going somewhere else.
When my friends and I were in high school we thought it was fun for some reason to take the blue line all the way to the airport and then back.
Good Lord, why are we such dorks as teenagers?
My usual stop is next and I’m so happy to not be gathering my things right now and making my way to the doors. Instead I get to sit here with my incredibly well packed carry-on and wave goodbye as we pass up the suburb I spend every day working in the exciting international shiiping industry, and take my happy self to security gate (because I checked in online) and board a plane for beautiful Miami.
The Secret Life of Pandas 