Time traveling: Since Japan sees the sun rise 16 hours before California, we fly backwards in time. Twenty-five hours in transit, leaving Tokyo on Tuesday late afternoon, and we are home sweet home in Santa Barbara at 6 p.m. Tuesday night. Macduff opens a bottle of Syrah, I make a caprese salad with tomatoes from our garden. We watch two episodes of Midnight Diner: Tokyo and are in bed by 9 p.m. I sleep through most of the next day. Crazy delicious, beauty sleep, dreams, and wake to find the laundry my prince has done hanging on the line, and he is in his studio at work captioning images from our trip. I wake at 3 p.m., still believing it is Tuesday until around 4 p.m. when we drive to meet friends at the James Joyce for a weekly get-together and find the parking lot empty. It’s Wednesday.
Over our 36 years together, we have traveled extensively, usually on magazine assignments, but more recently, by ship on Lindblad/National Geographic expeditions, where Macduff serves as National Geographic photographer for one hundred or so guests, and on occasion I accompany him.
Admittedly, despite luminous, life-changing expeditions to the Arctic, Antarctica, New Zealand, and more, we have not traveled “like the old days” since the pandemic. I dearly long for those times. Such solo travel is foundational to our marriage. It is a remarkable gift to share, to discover things novel or familiar in new environs. The freedom to venture down hidden alleyways, including mistaken turns, or even an improbable evening in a motel/restaurant/bowling alley in Veracruz, México, where off-work engineers serenade us with an impromptu guitar concert, and one of them passes us a hand-written map and directions on a napkin to an unknown archaeological site. Traveling solo, we might visit the same small restaurant a second time (for instance, in both Mytilene and Segesta), and be greeted and treated not like tourists, but family. Caught in a cyclone bearing down on Auckland, we snatch the last flight out to the South Island to reinvent our journey. Dealing with unexpected difficulties, sometimes even serious accidents, is part and parcel of the travel I love. We meet strangers across seven continents and become friends. It is sharing at its finest.