“Bula”
We sprang from the massive 747-400 like starved beasts after a season’s hibernation, shedding our winter coats in the same manner. As we came to the main corridor, we were greeted by the first of many “Bula!” (Welcome/Hello) gestures that this once savage, cannibalistic culture had come to adopt. Guitar plucks, ukulele riffs and a few native notes hung in the air; three musicians wearing vibrant sulu skirts (traditional informal garb for both men and women) and tourist-friendly Hawaiian shirts beckoned us into their home.
We bought tickets for a local bus that was supposed to depart just after our arrival, but this was Fiji and just like any tropical island, it ran on its own sweet time. Although exhausted, we were in no hurry. Maybe an hour later we had thrown our suitcases into a large, air-conditioned charter bus and were on our way…on the wrong side of the road. Due to this, the lack of street signs, and the accelerated pace of island driving (somehow the antithesis of everything else island), we thought every corner turned would be our last.
Our bus made frequent stops, picking up and dropping off at the wave of a stranded, barefoot wanderer or a holler from the back. The journey took us through quaint villages, past colorful schoolhouses, and over rivers that ran as brown as native skin. We saw white beaches that seamlessly evolved into Jurassic rainforests before once again returning to their simpler, sandier forms. The coastline continued in these perfect, undulating waves of green and white until it came to an abrupt stop at a man-made reef. The high, foreboding walls of each resort & spa jutted from the landscape like industrial billboards, promising leisurely, secluded pleasure. The driver howled onto the accelerator.
Almost two hours down the Coral Coast from the Nadi Airport, our bus came to a sudden stop on a small dirt road. “Mango Bay!” the driver fired in our direction. We groggily fumbled our suitcases onto the dirt road that led into the jungle. It was mid-morning. We had arrived.

By the Bay
Mango Bay is a flashpackers’ resort, built on a minute cove that rests on the jungle’s precipice. There are no walls or man-made waterfalls, no starred restaurants or Tempur-Pedic beds; the dirt road had led us to jungle, beach and palms, a few bures (traditional thatched houses), a handful of cabins, a pool, a bar and a hand-painted sign that warned of falling coconuts with a smiley face beneath it. A light rain began to pitter-patter against or suitcases, muddying the dirt beneath our boots. We found our cabin, turned the key, and sank to our bed in unison.

When we came to it must have been well after noon. The rain had ceased, leaving the grass glistening and cool beneath bare feet. We made our way to the water’s edge for the first time, barely containing our excitement. The sun shown brightly above tanned skins and tealed tides. Beyond the cookie-cutter palms and bright corals, a lone boat lazily drifted towards the horizon. We touched the water, letting its warmth bathe over our traveled soles; a school of fluorescent fish played through white sands, just beyond our wading reach.

Tourists & Cannibals
We stayed in or near the water for the entire day, exploring the bay’s private coral reefs with borrowed gear from a 21st century Fijian armory: snorkels, flippers and a canoe for two. Only a century before, missionaries and sailors wrote of how natives had also surged into the waters with an arsenal, but their double-canoed Drua warships had been carved thirty meters long, holding nearly two hundred soldiers, and their weaponry included an array of spears, skull crushers, and other specialized clubs that facilitated the feasting on bodies of the fallen. Their sea-bound objectives were not indulged by pleasantries and scenery; their missions were savage, fueled by bloodlust, greed and power.

I learned about Fiji’s past while visiting Singatoka—an urban center with nearly 10,000 residents of mostly Fijian and Indian descent—when a local store-owner began to retell the gruesome stories of his ancestors. He took a menacing three-pronged apparatus about 30 cm long from the rack where it was prominently displayed, “This fork was used after the skull had been crushed, to select the more desired parts of the brain.” Noting Catalina’s reaction he added, “We are happy to not be this way anymore, but we do not hide our past.”

Fijians are proud of their heritage—they still wear traditional garb, speak in local dialects, and conduct tribal ceremonies—and when we left the store, we began to notice just how happy they were to share it with us. Almost every Fijian that passed greeted us with an authentic smile and a vibrant salutation. Even from the other side of the road, men, women, and children welcomed us exuberantly with two hands held high, waving like sun-bathed flagpoles, “Bula!” The Fijians of the Coral Coast were not envious of the wealth sprouting around them; instead, they embraced tourists as an essential part of more than just their economy, but also as a part of their community. That embrace never felt so strong as when Catalina and I went to visit a local school.

School Daze
Away from the water’s edge, sweat had already begun to drip through our shirts. I looked at Catalina to see her upper lip covered with a light dew. I thought of the natives and how practical they were: no shoes, no shirts, just sulus. By the time we got to the van, I realized that their safety regulations were just as un-inhibiting as their garb: the vehicle’s tires were bald, the seatbelts loose, but our driver promised a short ride.

In less then ten minutes we had climbed the winding kilometer of dirt that led to the main street. Five minutes later, a rugby pitch marked the school’s entrance. The walkway that followed the pitch’s end-zone seemed inviting and fun: smiling yellow “happy faces” adorned the inside of the nearest bus stop, recycled blue, yellow, red, and green plastic bottles hung in chains around the out-door hallways, and children ran barefoot from one class to the next.

I sauntered up the stairs with my camera out, feeling like a true tourist, but as soon as I reached the last step my doubts subsided. Little brown faces smiled, winked and stuck their tongues out at us in jubilee; their tired white palms turned to enthusiastic peace signs and waves of welcome.

The head mistress, Madame Adi, greeted us from behind a wall of children and beckoned us into her classroom, “Bula! Come in please,” she said. Although I was a hemisphere away from home, her classroom felt familiar. Desks sat quietly in the background while colors, shapes and simple poems danced along the walls; in the foreground, thirty second-graders paraded over a palm-leaf carpet that lay beneath our feet.

The head mistress proceeded to explain about their school system and the English program: free education from kindergarten to eighth and all classes except for Fijian Culture were conducted in their second language (English). In Madame Adi’s class most grammar and spelling was taught through song and dance which the students were delighted to share with us in a ten-minute medley that included “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” “The Wheels on the Bus,” and many other elementary school classics. After the mixtape medley had ended, the children, barely winded, sat down to our applause.

We briefly introduced ourselves, unsure of how much the students understood, before it was time for us to move-on and for their lessons to continue. Madame Adi was on a tight schedule but managed to escort us towards the door with a sea of second-graders in tow, where she accepted our meager but welcomed donations. Sixty dollars didn’t seem like much, but to the Madame and her students it meant the world. With the government only renewing textbooks once every five years and a recent boost in attendance (thanks to government-funded busing), these donations had become the line between illiteracy and bilinguality, a right to an education or a life destined for poverty.

We wandered the school grounds for as long as we could without distracting the other classes. The students were sad to see us go, but they knew other wayward tourists would eventually wander through the plastic-bottle-chains and smiley faces, investing a few more dollars into their expanding education.

We made our way back to Mango Bay to watch the rest of the day progress into our last evening. We witnessed the sun fall into the horizon as summer hues slowly collapsed into an autumn fire. The sky’s radiance glistened across a mirror-smooth bay, engulfing the scenery in a blaze of color. A fishing vessel surged through the water, cracking the glass in two. Four silhouettes moved slowly across the ship’s deck, cutting the motor just offshore as the boat coasted towards us. After eight hours beyond the break, the mix of local and tourist fishermen were too tired to talk; instead, they moved like waterlogged shadows through the sands, carrying our dinner over their shoulders. It looked like tuna tonight.

Vinaka Fiji (Thank You Fiji)
After all is said and much left to be done, Fiji is an incongruent land of tourists and natives, of rich and poor, of educated and ignorant. For some, it is a paradise found, where days pass lazily along into an endless summer of watered-down Mojitos, but for many others it is a paradise lost, where each passing day is shorter than the last.

In this land, natives embrace tourists as much more than economic resources: we are cherished as traveling neighbors who support a changing community. We are welcomed to the world’s most pristine beaches, greeted in the streets as ambassadors or celebrities, and invited into schools as guests of honor. As modern-day missionaries, we travelers must find the time to invest in the Fijian community, to break down the cultural and literal resort & spa barriers and to open-up to Fiji as the Fijians have so graciously done for us; although our footprints fade long before we board the plane, the impression we leave behind does not.

Sedona has become a center for traditional and contemporary arts and offers a variety of galleries, boutiques and specialty shops. It is an upscale retirement and tourism community, because it is the jumping off place for tours of the Red Rocks region.

Sedona began as a small, remote ranching and farming settlement in 1876 when the first permanent settler, John James Thompson, squatted in Oak Creek Canyon. By 1902, 20 families lived in the settlement and a postal station was petitioned for by Theodore Schnelbly. The petition was granted and Schnelbly named the new post office in honor of his wife, Sedona. The remote agricultural community was well-know for the quality of its fruit, especially the abundant apple orchards. But as the scenic wonders and sites of Sedona became known, tourism surpassed agriculture in economic importance. .

In 1950, surrealist painter Max Ernst moved to Sedona, and other famous artists followed. Many artists have been attracted to Sedona and its rugged beauty which is said to enhance their creativity. Over the years, an artist colony has developed in Sedona and many of the artists sell their work in local galleries and shops. It may have been more than the scenic red rocks that stimulated the creativity of artists. It is believed by many people that the region of Sedona contains a concentration of vortexes which are spots that release psychic energy or power from the Earth. The four local points which are considered to be energy vortexes are Bell Rock, Table Top Mountain, Cathedral Rock and Boynton Canyon.

Sedona is located in northern Arizona only 130 miles from Phoenix, 40 miles from Flagstaff, 20 miles from Jerome, 60 miles from Prescott, 20 miles from Camp Verde, 16 miles from Cottonwood and about 20 miles from Clarkdale. You can even make a day trip to the Grand Canyon from here.

Once in Sedona, there are many things to see and do. Why not check out the many unique shops in Jerome, or relax and have a bit to eat at one of our many restaurants, listen to some great music, explore the red rocks, hike, swim or just relax .

Once you have spent enough time shopping and relaxing in Sedona, why not check out one of the communities close to us to see what they have to offer. There is just about everything one could desire in the vicinity of Sedona, Arizona.

It is New Year’s morning and I woke up feeling as if I had been walking the desert plains for twelve months. Spinning and swaying, I tilted my head underneath the spout drinking vigorously as if I were about to die. It was excruciatingly hot in the cabin that morning, someone had turned the heater up to over eighty degrees and it didn’t help that the place had not been cleaned or remodeled since 1962. I stumbled upstairs to find everyone else in roughly the same spirit, but talking, chatting, and conversing. Something I do not do in the morning; especially after a bottle of Jameson.

First things first, espresso, coffee, orange juice, whatever, give it to me. Now, I could have gone the night before and picked up some good coffee beans at the grocery store, but when I asked certain friends the day before, I was told, “Yeah we have coffee; we have everything.” I was ready to throw the grounds into the coffee maker in the kitchen that morning. To my dismay, it was instant coffee (yes, I am a coffee snob) and not only that, I was feeling claustrophobic with seven people inside this dark sauna cave; spinning, I needed to get the hell out of there. Don’t get me wrong though, all of them are my good friends, one being a best friend visiting from Minnesota, who is probably the only one who really understands my “vanishing act.” But one hung-over Negative Nancy can only take so much, and dust in a jar holding absolutely no caffeine cure whatsoever. I slowly turned to everyone:
“I’ll be back; going down the street.”
I grabbed my camera, took Vito—my dog—hopped into the car, and drove to the nearest coffee provider where I wouldn’t see any human-beings that would bother me with conversation. Where would this oasis be, you ask? The gas station; always a winner. They carry a lifetime supply of emergency snacks like beef jerky to cure a stomach with acidic hunger, a few health bars maybe, medical needs and so forth. This is my kind of morning folk, simple folk and clerks that minimize morning conversation to:
“I’ll take that Tylenol behind you and a pack of Parliament Lights please, oh here; I forgot the bottle water and my coffee.”
“Ah the morning essentials sir, good combination, happy New Year.”
“Thank you.
I walked outside to a picnic bench, breathing in the Lake Tahoe crisp clean air and ironically, I lit up a smoke. Ah, now we’re talking; the caffeine filled my veins and I could hear Agent Cooper from Twin Peaks in my head, “Now that, is a damn fine cup of coffee.” Yes, I do have a kick ass espresso machine at home and have drank some of the best coffee around in Europe, but I still believe some of the best cups of coffee, are found at your local gas station.
I sat there, thinking of nothing, and was staring at a corner of Lake Tahoe peaking from across the street through a pine branch just above the Waffle House. I got in my car, turned on a David Bowie mix and drove across the street literally one block. Remember, walking is not permitted on these types of mornings. I rubbed my eyes and to my pleasure was the most beautiful New Year’s morning I have ever seen. From being in a dark sauna cave cabin, filled with dust, to a sight of a deep blue sky mapped across a lake to infinity. The sky was endless. I grabbed my camera and noticed another photographer putting his equipment away. I walked down to the beach with my coffee and sat down on the cool sand with Vito. As the sun’s warm rays were dancing on our faces, off in the distance, I could hear a flock of geese chatting away about where they are headed or maybe talking about all the good fish they could eat in Tahoe. The geese were flying over me now and I started shooting, taking shots continuously as they flew over, Canadian Geese, they are a surreal site.
The water was clear, the color blue seemed to swallow us and the other photographer was cussing off in the distance that he missed the shot. The moment was completely unplanned, an actual moment of clarity. After I took my shots I flipped through them with a huge smile. I knew friends were back at the cave, but this was a magical moment of relaxation; so I decided to just sit there. I was thinking: why the hell did I get lazy with my photography for the past three years? I have been making photographs since I was thirteen years old. Some people have New Year’s resolutions and I realized I have never made one before, ever in my life. But what the hell is a New Year’s resolution anyhow? And I can honestly say I don’t know one person who has followed through with a New Year’s resolution they made. So I decided, I’m not making a resolution, I’m continuing my goal of what I have done since I was thirteen years old through the eyes of my grandfather. Writing and photography, stay on the path as I have always done, and never veer from it and to always push forward no matter what happens.
This is what I saw on the morning of January 1st 2012, and if you, my friend, ever feel the need to escape for a few minutes, an hour or a week, do it. You never know what might happen and always expect the unexpected and hang on to its beauty. Who cares what people say when you go off and feel the urge to just “go.” I find the people who say, “How can you like being alone?” are the ones who are scared of what life might throw them. They are the ones who expect everything to happen step by step, numbered one through ten.
It is visions like these that make me happy to be alive and thankful to do what I do. Although I feel certain images I capture are mere ghosts, they will always be with me forever. What started as a hung-over, boiling morning in a cave, turned out to be an awesomely beautiful New Year’s Day. Nature put on a show for me and I would have been greatly disappointed if I missed that moment. So, in a strange way, I have a hangover and a bottle of Jameson to be grateful for.

I remember the exact moment when I reached the end of the idealized “Eurotrip” version of Europe and was entering into the more sobering part of my travels. I had just taken the S-bahn to a hostel in East Berlin, where I met my host, who showed me to the elevator.

“It only stops on the fourth and seventh floors,” he told me.

“I blame the Soviets for this,” I said with a laugh.

It didn’t occur to me until later that this was first time since I was 5 years old that I’d stepped into a Soviet landscape. My parents fled the USSR in 1989; I spent a sunny childhood—literally and figuratively—in Los Angeles. Though I remembered very little of my homeland,
I’d been well-versed my entire life in Communism and its terrors, thanks to my family.

East Berlin, therefore, was the perfect place for me to actualize the nightmares of my family’s past. Not only did it stand in contrast with the grandiose architecture of Western Europe, but you could also literally walk from What if World War II didn’t happen to Well, it did in a matter of minutes. I took a leisurely stroll through Unter den Linden, Berlin’s reconstructed Neoclassical Royal Bouvelard, which stretches from the Brandenburg Gate to the magnificent Museum Island. From there, I walked the entire length of Karl-Marx-Allee, formerly known as Stalinallee.

The ignorant utilitarianism of this grand boulevard quickly became overwhelming. Giant cement blocks—built as quickly and cheaply as possible—passed as buildings, standing high as to maximize their imposing stature. And to maximize their capacity. Numbers, not people, as my mother would say. This was high-Stalinist architecture personified: Bigger, cheaper, faster. Though I had grown up halfway around the world and had spent most of my adult life trying to unlearn it, it had become a familiar, yet uncomfortable, part of me.

I felt the same while walking through the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. This was the first stop on the Tour de Holocaust—I should note here that I’m half-Jewish. The memorial covers an entire city block and features more than two-thousand concrete stelae that oscillate and wobble. It was a strange isolation as I walked through them. With only room for one person at a time, I paused at every corner, not knowing who—if anyone—would be around it. It felt a bit like watching The Pianist.

Peter Eisenman, the architect who designed the monument, purposely made it devoid of any symbolism, saying very little about it publicly. One thing he has mentioned is being inspired by some of the old Jewish quarters around Eastern Europe. I drew this connection, too, when I next paid a visit to the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague.

In Josefov, Prague’s old Jewish quarter, the cemetery had been in use since the beginning of the 15th Century. When the city refused to give the Jews any more land, they began adding more and more dirt, creating up to 12 layers of burials in some spots. One hundred thousand graves are in this tiny plot, with tombstones literally butting shoulders. It’s a truly sacred place.

Unlike many of the other cities I visited, Prague’s old Jewish quarter is filled with authentic old Jewish heritage and charm. As nice as this sounds, the reason for the preservation is appalling: Hilter intended to use it to create an “Exotic Museum to the Extinct Race.”

But people don’t come to Prague to be depressed! They come to party, to drink Pilsner, to enjoy the post-Communist economy with their Western Dollars! So, that evening, over a beer with a sweet, local Jewish girl named Dominicka, I struggled to find the best way to ask how her family had survived. “My grandfather was one of the children saved by Nicholas Winton,” she said. Even as I was trying to drown the past in a pint, I was talking to the grandchild of one of the 669 children rescued from Czechoslovakia by the British humanitarian. Running from the past wasn’t working.

This wasn’t the only time during the trip I’d met a fellow Jew. It happened over Sukkot—a week-long holy festival—while in Budapest. There I shared a hostel with an Orthodox Jew from Jerusalem. He invited me out for a traditional Sukkot lunch where I met a handful of Jews from around the world. They all spoke to each other in Hebrew, only making small talk with me in broken English. Our conversations ended with them saying how much they enjoy Budapest and, even though they are just passing through, that it still feels like home.

How could these Jews feel at home when nearly one-half million Hungarian Jews were murdered here less than a decade ago? My shock quelled when I learned that Jewish tombstones had been found in Hungary dating back to the 3rd Century—a full six centuries before Hungarians ever settled there. Unlike the rest of Europe, they had reason to feel at home.

It’s no wonder, then, that Budapest boasts one of the largest synagogues in the world, the Dohány Street Synagogue, a unique Moorish Revival building with some strangely Christian attributes. Adjacent to the synagogue is the birthplace of Theodore Herzl, the father of political Zionism and the State of Israel. There’s also a cemetery for the people of the Jewish Ghetto who died during the occupation, as well as the Memorial of the Hungarian Jewish Martyrs—a beautiful, steel weeping willow that doubles as an upside-down menorah whose leaves are printed with the names of Holocaust victims.

I didn’t just mourn the past in Budapest, though. I also looked intently to the future; which is why I bought a 500 Forint (roughly US $2.50) balcony ticket to the opera. The Hungarian State Opera is one of the most stunning buildings in the city. Its interior alone is easily worth the price of admission. After a lovely performance of Simon Boccanegra, the audience erupted in a bizarrely in-sync slow clap that gradually got faster while staying in-sync. Similar ovations took place after each performer. I leaned over to the young Hungarian girl who made small talk with me during intermission and asked why everyone was clapping like that. “It’s left over from Communism,” she said. “It’s how everyone was taught to clap—all together, as one—whenever politicians spoke, to show their support. It stuck, especially with a lot of the old people.”

Though there’s only one official Soviet monument left in Budapest—the rest have been safely stowed away and are available for viewing in Memento Park—there are still some relics of the past that have proven difficult for Hungarians to shake. Despite receiving the universal health care that their high taxes provide, doctors and nurses regularly take bribes. I spoke with a woman in her forties that didn’t bribe the hospital when she delivered her first child, learned her lesson, and brought envelopes of cash when she was ready to have her second.

Nevertheless, Budapest is a gorgeous city that managed to survive the war and the Soviet occupation that followed. Another city I visited—Kraków, Poland—had similar fortunes. The Germans spared its destruction because it was to become part of German territory. Kraków has a beautiful central square, a hilltop with a castle, and an old Jewish Quarter that has become the trendy part of town. While nearly all of Poland is now ethnic Poles, it’s suddenly hip to be Hebrew. From what I gathered, finding out that one of your grandparents used to have a Jewish last name is the street cred equivalent of touring with Skrillex.

Kraków is also home to Oskar Schindler’s factory, now a museum, as well as part of the old Ghetto wall, which, in a bizarre example of foreshadowing, is shaped like a row of traditional, round Jewish tombstones. In 1942, some of the residents were deported to nearby labor camps, some were killed in the streets, and most were sent to Auschwitz.

I visited the Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau death camps the following day. Neither words nor pictures can do what I saw justice. I will say, however, that everyone should visit and pay their respects at some point in their lives. The systematic and efficient genocide that happened there is unimaginable. I spent several days and sleepless nights afterwards, though, trying to imagine it. It took 20 minutes to murder 2,000 people in the gas chambers. There were four gas chambers running at a time.

Unlike Kraków, Warsaw was almost completely destroyed by the war. Everything there is reconstructed, but the most beautiful place I visited was the Okopowa Street Jewish Cemetery. It’s one of the largest in Europe, sprawling 83 acres. It’s a bit like going on a hike in the city, but amongst the overgrown trees are countless tombstones. It’s been in use since the early 18th Century, but its post-war abandonment has left it in a very slow-paced state of rehabilitation thanks to private organizations and donors from around the world. It also contains mass graves from the Warsaw Ghetto, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.

I had very little luck finding much else in Warsaw left from the thriving Jewish culture that once was. It wasn’t just the Holocaust that left no trace; Stalin similarly erased religion from the Soviet bloc’s story, including my family. Most of what I know about my people comes from movies or mere chance. My dad married a non-Jew. My grandmother only spoke Yiddish in private. Later, my dad told me I had a great, great grandfather who was a rabbi. But all of that seemed to end completely with my generation.

The entire trip left me with a very heavy heart. I found it hard to enjoy cheap drinks while contemplating how the Jewish tradition had been systematically wiped out from my family. Undeterred, I did leave inspired to learn about my history, with my eyes more open and with a more honest view of who I am today—a Jew trying to remember, a Russian trying to forget, an American trying to reach the next destination on her endless itinerary.

“South Dakota… What’s in South Dakota?” No matter what, this is the response I get whenever I mention my desire to be there. For over three years, I’d been just itching to go to South Dakota, even though it meant a lot of strange looks from friends and family. Despite the number of times my hubby and I have been asked this simple—and now expected—question, we have yet to come up with the right words to answer. Sometimes words just don’t cut it.

The Black Hills, which are located in the south west region of the state, offer some great tourist attractions that are certainly worth a visit: Mt. Rushmore, Crazy Horse Memorial, the Badlands, Mammoth Site, Hot Springs, and Custer—just to name a few. For any interested tourist, a simple Internet search will reveal the many parks, forests, and protected areas that are open to visitors, as well as a multitude of manmade attractions for all ages, like Big Thunder Gold Mine and Rockin R Trail Rides.

Upon arrival, our anticipation was stacked, and with so many places on our travel list, we decided to start with what seemed like the obvious choice: Mt. Rushmore. Heading out of Rapid City, the transition from rolling grassy fields to pristine forested mountains happened almost instantly. As we entered the Black Hills National Forest for the first time, I knew we’d made the right choice. The drive out to Mt. Rushmore in and of itself had some of the most spectacular views I have ever seen.

From the confines of our rental car, I gazed out the window like a small child on her first trip to Disney World. In the distance, rocky peaks jutted toward the sky, mingling with the clouds, while walls of stone and raw earth edged the winding paved highway. While Mt. Rushmore was as magnificent as promised, I was far more captivated by its surroundings. The pure, untouched beauty was what the adventurer in me had been hoping to discover; and I’d found it.

The essence, the spirit of the Black Hills, is far too much to take in if you’re simply passing through. For the true outdoorsman, backpacking would be the ultimate way to really experience this majestic natural wonderland.

Although my heart felt most at home amid the dense trees and steep cliffs of the mountains, we traveled on to see what else South Dakota had to offer. To the east of the National Forest, we found miles and miles of grassy rolling hills that stretched out into the distance as far as the eye could see. Like an ocean of honey-colored grass that brought songs like “Wide Open Spaces” and “Home, Home on the Range” to my mind, and left a sweetness hanging in the air of raw sugar or fresh baked cookies. Save for the clock on the dash, I could almost believe that time did not exist.

By the fourth day, the rental car had become our trusty friend, allowing us to venture to the north through Deadwood and Spearfish where the word “remote” took on a whole new meaning. Our October travel date meant that many of the tourist attractions were closed for the off season, and we were too early for skiing. There were plenty of old fashioned saloons and casinos around, if you dig that sort of thing. Since I’m not much for gambling, and it was too early to drink, the Spearfish Canyon Scenic Byway was just about our only option—which certainly wasn’t a bad thing. Even on a dreary day, fall was in full swing. Leaves were turning shades of bright yellow and burnt orange, highlighting the brown, gray, and pink limestone cliffs of the canyon.

Perhaps the most wonderful part of escaping to the Black Hills, away from the rat race of daily life, was the proximity to Rapid City and the modern conveniences it had to offer. At the end of the day, a warm meal was always just around the corner, and for breakfast, at Black Hills Bagels, I found the most scrumptious western egg sandwich I’ve ever tasted. Packed with plenty of small town charm and friendly locals, my husband and I felt right at home—the boldly unique, made-on-site beers from the Firehouse Brewing Company also helped with that.

My thirst for serenity had been quenched. The troubles and stresses of life that had followed me off the plane upon arrival were nowhere to be found, even as I boarded the plane that would take us back home to Florida. It was as if my soul had been retuned, reset, by a few short days in the beautiful Black Hills of South Dakota.

Pick up a copy of WHOA Today or subscribe to the Digital for more great features!

*The full travel feature is available in the Fall 2011 issue of WHOA Magazine available in stores Oct. 11.

The next day we woke up lazily around ten, just in time for breakfast’s last call. We ate some hardy eggs on Anadama and slices of apple kuchen accompanied by tea and juice. Between bites we decided that today we were going to try our luck on the open road, we just needed to find a means to do so. When faced with car-less road travel in South America, it’s important to carefully consider any and all options; ours read accordingly, listed from most expensive to cheapest:

1. Rent a car, but that’s a risky business in terms of insurance, road conditions, scams, etc.
2. Take a taxi, but the views seem to lose their luster reflected off of tinted windows.
3. Take a bus, but they run just as leisurely as the country folk (every half hour if you’re lucky).
4. Gracefully extend your thumb to the heavens and hope that one of these country folk will pick you up before the bus does…and that’s exactly what we did.

A large tanker filled with salmon containers pulled off the dirt road as Cata’s arm fell back to her waist.  We scaled up the side, introduced ourselves, and were on our way to Ensenada. We had been told that Ensenada was a great place to visit, but twenty-five minutes down the road, when Cristóbal (our gracious chauffeur) asked us where we wanted to be dropped off, I met his glance, confused. Looking around I saw no more than a handful of houses and a convenience-looking store, “Um, en el centro?” “This is the center,” he candidly replied behind a broad smile.

After bidding farewell, we started off towards the only restaurant in sight. Restaurant Bordelago didn’t look like much from a distance, but as we got closer, I caught the savory smells of a fresh asado (BBQ) on the brisk air. At the top of the parking lot sat a boy and his grill. The grill looked like an extended metal shipping barrel that had been split lengthwise, opened up, flipped on its backside, and then mounted. Inside the barrel, embers from a dying wood fire seared fine cuts of lamb, cow and chicken; the boy graciously invited us to take a few turns at the grill’s helm. We accepted, and with each revolution of the skewered meats, our salivary glands dilated.