On Sunday, the first snowfall of winter covers the Convent of St. Birgitta in a blanket of pure white. “The world is cloaked in beauty today,” Father David Blanchfield says as he begins delivering morning mass to a dozen or so churchgoers bundled up in puffy parkas and thick scarves.
I’m the latest in a long lineage of travelers who have retreated to this convent. Since 1957, believers and non-believers alike have sought refuge at the 10-acre estate, with meandering woodland paths and rocky gardens nestled along a quiet, lake-like inlet of Long Island Sound. Charging just $150 a night for a room and three meals a day, Vikingsborg has become a popular seaside retreat among in-the-know artists, writers, and neighbors in search of quiet. But as one guest is quick to tell me, “this isn’t a Hilton.”
Instead, the convent’s nine guest rooms are more akin to sleeping over at your grandmother’s house, swaddling you in a familiar, matronly feeling of being watched over and cared for. Antique wooden dressers are laden with lace doilies, and in most corners, you’ll find floral upholstered armchairs deep enough to tuck in your knees.
“There are many different reasons that people come here,” says Sister Renzy, one of the six Bridgettine nuns who live together in a smaller house on the 10-acre estate. “But everyone who comes here, they feel the difference. This is a different world.”
💌 massive gratitude to @lalehannah for helping me shape this meandering love letter? Meditation? Prayer? To the people and places who give us the time and space to pay attention, and remind us how to be idle and blessed
Full story 🤍 traveler.com/story/retreating-to-a-connecticut-convent-with-the-order-of-hospitality
On the way to the airport again, thinking about Frida and Diego, and love and war. In a museum built by Carlos Sim, the 18th richest man in the world, our tour guide tells us that for a long time, Frida wasn’t well respected in Mexico because her art focused on her own internal struggles, compared to Diego’s outward political works. But when it comes to the public opinions of Mr. Sim, who has made his $700 million art collection free for public viewing, well that depends on which guide you talk to, he says.
Frida and Diego connected through the communist party—she, 21, and he, 42—each other’s comrade, lover, and muse. Days before Frida died, she attended a protest, via ambulance, against the CIA-orchestrated coup in Guatemala.
In their home-studio in Coyoacán, I walk across a rooftop bridge that separates their bedrooms, an alleged solution to their post-divorce remarriage, following affairs with Frida’s sister (his) and Leon Trotsky (hers). Their living room, where marxists theorists would mingle with surrealist painters and Hollywood stars, is filled with paint and paper-mâché skeletons and anthropomorphic figurines collected from Aztec temples.
The next day, when I wake up in a gentrified corner of Mexico City, hungover after partying with a bartender from Venezuela, the US has kidnapped Maduro. I think then, as I often do when traveling, of Jamaica Kincaid’s “A Small Place,” about how American tourism can be an extension of US imperialism. “A tourist is an ugly human being,” she tells me, head pounding. “You are not an ugly person all the time; you are not an ugly person ordinarily,” and I worry that I have been busy painting self portraits when I should be making murals.
Frida once wrote Diego (after their second marriage) and said “I’d like to paint you, but there are no colors, because there are so many, in my confusion, the tangible form of my great love.” But the last piece of art she ever made wasn’t of herself, or Diego. It was of watermelons. It’s called “Viva la vida,” her final message clearly spelled out into the sweet fruit’s bright pink flesh.
One year of living alone and being alone, of filling my shoebox apartment with books from The New Yorker toss-away bin and stolen pens from hotel rooms, of tacking postcards to the walls and drinking red wine from tea cups. There’s no dishwasher but oh, there’s a tree outside my window that I could stare at all day and my computer is the tv but have you seen the morning light bounce off my disco ball flower pot? Come over and sit with me on my pink velvet loveseat, there’s enough room for two if we face each other and intertwine our legs. But don’t worry if you can’t, on days when I’m lonely or sad I can always make coffee and dance around the kitchen in my underwear, or walk to the park and smile at babies and dogs and strangers. Did I tell you my brother painted the sand dunes beside my bed, so I can dream of the beaches in Cape Cod, and my mom made that one of the bandstand, in the gold frame by the door, a reminder to hum a song each time I hang up my keys? I carried the mirror from Chelsea flea in a trash bag during a rainstorm and the bookcase is from that antique store we love in Connecticut. In high school I sanded it down in the backyard until wood grain bled through the turquoise. On the top shelf there are cards from friends and gift shop knick-knacks and colorful stones from Norway to Montana, and a purple drawing of a woman that my grandma made. She gave it to me on our birthday, Dec 18, the date we somehow both share with her mother, too. According to the stars, three generations of restlessness stir in my veins. Some months, I may not be here long enough to unpack my suitcase, and when I finally return to New York, like I did today after a long 24 hours of travel, I have to lug it up four flights of stairs. It’s worth it though, for the sigh of relief once I reach the top. Ahhhh, yes. The feeling of arriving to a home you’ve built after packing it all up and leaving.
UN Week in New York City is “the Super Bowl of plane spotting,” says Rae Kaczmarek, a 21-year-old aviation enthusiast from Colorado. On top of today’s must-see lists are the German government’s aircraft, an Airbus A350, the South Korean presidential plane, a Boeing 747 known as Code One, and Air Force One. Around 4 p.m., Zelenskyy will land at JFK in an Airbus A319 narrow-body airliner, and later that evening Trump will land in a much-larger Boeing VC-25 aircraft (soon to be replaced by a $400 million Boeing 747-8 luxury jetliner gifted by the Qatari government). The two world leaders plan to meet on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly this week to discuss Russia-Ukraine peace negotiations. But here on the TWA rooftop, all that matters is the make and model of their planes.
“There’s no other drama. There’s no real-world stuff,” Kaczmarek tells me. “It’s just like, ‘Look at how cool this plane is!’ And everybody’s like, ‘Yeah! That’s awesome!’”
At this hotel bar, a more common allegiance to declare is if you’re Team Stripes, or a fan of Condor’s aggressive green-striped livery. If you ask someone to choose their favorite plane, expect a detailed response loaded with qualifiers (“Defunct or modern model? International or domestic? Airbus or Boeing?”)—or, a deep sigh followed by a heartfelt, “I love them all.”
One thing the plane spotters here all share is a deep sense of reverence for the miracle of flight: Look at planes long enough, and it’s impossible not to appreciate the engineering that allows a 400-ton metal tube to transport you across the globe in a matter of hours. “It’s kind of like magic,” Kaczmarek tells me, smiling ear-to-ear as we watch an A380’s impossibly graceful ascent over Jamaica Bay. “You just can’t not love it.”
I had so much fun writing about the joyfully geeky world of plane spotters for @cntraveler traveler.com/story/inside-the-joyfully-geeky-world-of-plane-spotting
Thank you @la_flightslive for letting me hang out and @spurrelly for the joyfully geeky edits!!
In Los Angeles, opportunity is buried in the sprawl. Every hyphenated waitress and bartender is digging to unearth it, the promise land of fame. It is different than the opportunity of New York, so compounded by the city’s density that it bubbles over, leaving you no choice but to be swept up in its wake. To let life rip the steering wheel from your hands. But what is free will if not the difference between driving a car and riding the subway? The ability to turn right instead of left, to hit the brakes or pump the gas. (LA never fails to remind me how much I hate to drive.) Looking down into the valley from the eight-lane freeway, a wave of megalaphobia hits me (think: cruise ships and outer space) and I wonder what everyone is driving toward. What would my life look like here, spread out and flattened by choice, or the illusion of it? The intoxication of celebrity offers some path forward, at least. Easily confused at first with vanity, but really our deepest desire to be understood—to be known and loved and remembered for our talents. To be applauded for our work. A worthy pursuit when you have the space for it. But in Manhattan, with this many people living on top of each other, it becomes much more difficult to believe that you are special. New Yorkers do not struggle to be noticed. When you can hear your neighbor singing in the shower through the walls and stand ass-to-ass every morning on the train, it is anonymity—not celebrity—that you begin to crave. But protect your bubble too closely, and you slowly start to disappear. Maybe wedged somewhere between the coasts is an ideal balance between a public and private life. Maybe I will head to Chicago.
It is my first time in the desert and I cannot believe how the dry, inhospitable landscape of dust and red rock invokes the same feeling as staring out across the Atlantic ocean. “It just makes you feel so small,” I hear more than one train passenger whisper as we gaze upward through the windows of the observation car. This perspective—which calms some and frightens others—is due to the visual human-to-nature ratio on display, but it is the temporal proportion of my life to the desert’s that possesses me all the way from Moab to Glenwood Springs.
The mesas of Southern Utah look like pastel drawings—their layered bands of light green, burnt orange, and pale pink have inspired artists and writers for as long as we’ve been around. The rock with the bluish tint, our guides Olivia and Mike explain, is this color because 200 million years ago, it was under a sea. In water, iron deposits from volcanic ash turn green (the opposite of how iron reacts with oxygen, which forms the reddish-brown of rust). If you take a shovel to one of the ant hills along the rail tracks, you can find fossilized shark teeth. Dinosaur tracks are still preserved in the sandstone.
The first time I hear this I do not believe it and ask to confirm, “So that rock was around when there were dinosaurs?” I look at the crumbling cliffside and picture the millions of years it has witnessed, and somehow endured. A tangible object remaining constant for that long, among so much change, is unfathomable to me. And that I could reach out and hold this blue dinosaur dust in my fragile human hand, even more so.
That is when Mike reminds me that the Earth itself is a really old rock, and that its 4.5 billion years of history have always been encoded in layers hidden beneath our feet. It just takes the right combination of salt and erosion to reveal the Southwestern sea.
“Dinosaur Dust” from Day 2 aboard the @rockymountaineer Rockies to Red Rocks route (thank you @olivia_lopezz for all your rock facts! please factcheck my geology)
It has been six years since we were last all together in Granada, an old magical city nestled in Spain’s Sierra Nevada Mountains. We are spread out across the country now, working in New York and Chicago and Boston and Los Angeles, and we are no longer girls. We’ve become journalists and scuba diving instructors and worked in Hollywood and the government and ran marathons and raised money for sustainable startups and developing economies. We’ve fallen in and out of love and watched our parents do the same. So much has changed. But still, we took planes and trains and borrowed cars and caught rides to meet for one weekend at the elbow of Cape Cod, a not-so-easy-to-get-to place jutting 70 miles into the Atlantic Ocean. Once we all arrive, giddy with jet lag and old memories, we walk down the street and past the fish pier to the beach. With nothing standing between us and the Iberian Peninsula where we first met, we lay down our towels in the sand and open a bottle of wine. For the next 72 hours, we do nothing but talk and laugh and dance, slipping back into girlhood like we never left.
Solo Travel Diaries Part 2: @hannah_taking_notes in Key West, Florida.
Key West holds a special place in my heart. The quirky Conch Republic has long been home to a thriving community of musicians, artists, and writers who are some of the kindest and most interesting people I’ve met while traveling. I stayed here solo for almost two weeks last year before heading south to Guatemala and left with lifelong memories and friendships. Stop by @andyscabana on open mic nights, @keywestyogasanctuary for community classes and creative writing workshops, book a fishing charter with experts like @captbryson , grab a bite at @moondogcafekw and camp out under the palms at Fort Zachary beach. Just don’t be surprised if you get invited out on a sailboat (or two) on your first day. I am counting down the days until I can go back!
🔗 Tap the link in bio for the full list of the best places for women to travel solo in the US.
In Botswana’s Okavango Delta, there is no clear delineation between where the land ends and water begins. Driving through Vumbura Plains, we jostle over sandy hills that turn into lagoons overnight and swerve around tree trunks chewed down to the stump by elephants. The deep belly laughter of hippos wakes us just before sunrise, their small ears twitching above the waterline like a submarine periscope, humorously disproportionate to the whale-like body hiding beneath. The winding channels of the Delta have been carved by these gigantic creatures, breaking through blockages of reeds and water lilies and opening floodgates for the rain that flows down from Angola each year. Meanwhile, the tiniest of the land’s inhabitants, the termite, work steadily to build up mounds of fungus and sand, the foundation of the lagoon’s precious islands. Birds who feed on the insects leave behind seeds that grow into trees that then form ecosystems for red lechwe antelope to graze and roam.
The animals are both the inhabitants and creators of this land, but the Delta has left its mark on them too. Young elephants pass us in the bush with fleshy knobs where there should be tails, the scars of gator bites from wading through deep rivers, and the Sitatunga have evolved long, splayed hooves to prevent them from getting stuck in the boggy wetland.
I wonder what role we play in this interconnected web, and Kabo tells me most of the animals who were born here aren’t skittish of the jeep’s engine—they can now recognize the vehicles as harmless. The ones who have migrated over from hunting territories take just a few months to adjust to humans shooting cameras instead of guns. (1/2)
I am making coffee with my grandpa’s favorite espresso and thinking about what it means to pass something down—a recipe, a worldview, a skill, a taste— these parcels of knowledge that transcend death and allow memories to live within the simple scent of Café Bustelo. In Canada, I learned how the most effective bridge to the afterlife (especially in nomadic communities who can’t lug around books and photo albums) is oral storytelling. Around the fire, the Elders share tales of getting lost in the woods in the dead of winter, and I am in awe of how much information is bundled inside, how much we are capable of carrying within us without outsourcing instinct to the internet.
If you eat whale blubber or caribou fat every day for two weeks before a winter journey through the bush, your hands will stay warm to the touch in -30 degrees. The best time to set a beaver trap is when the tamarack leaves have fallen, but if you use a fresh stick to set it, another beaver will gnaw through and bury the carcass of their kin the mud. Just one small error in the positioning of a screw can ruin the whole damn thing. And here in the bush, no food means no food. So they tell stories and listen and remember in a way I fear most of us have forgotten. There is no wonder why the Earth here feels so much more alive. This collective memory of generations hums inside every tree branch, flowing between the land and people long gone.
Full story: traveler.com/story/winter-journey-to-northern-quebec-with-cree-nation
“I’ve always found it hard to feel lonely with a lighthouse in sight. This one, in particular, is a familiar figure in my life. The red and white beacon of Greens Ledge punctuates many of my childhood memories, an ever-present symbol of the Norwalk coastline. Greens Ledge, the eponymous underwater shoal that the lighthouse marks, was a popular high school fishing spot; during the summer we’d go jigging for bass, bobbing on a boat by the rocks come high tide. Years before that, in elementary school, I wrote a short story about a girl who lived in this very lighthouse and took a sailboat to class each day. My teacher later told me that she thought the story was true at the time, but it was pure fiction—until now, I’d never actually been to the lighthouse itself. Growing up, nobody was allowed to visit the government-owned property except for the Coast Guard.
The kindred connection I felt with this inanimate building is not uncommon in America’s coastal communities. As James Hyland, president of The Lighthouse Preservation Society, tells me: “There’s certainly a spiritual, and also a reassuring, aspect to lighthouses. It’s kind of like the feeling you had when you were a child having a night light in your room that protects you from the dark.”
Thank you @savegreensledge for fulfilling my childhood dream of being a lighthouse keeper for the night, fellow Rowaytonite @c.w.johnsonn for perfectly capturing this special place 📸, partner in crime @aratimenon and editor extraordinaire @spurrelly !!
Check out our package SEEKING QUIET for more stories about the quest for stillness in an increasingly noisy world. Link in bio 💙
We’re back with another editor dispatch from @cntraveler Associate Editor @hannah_taking_notes :
In February, I ventured deep into the Canadian bush to spend four days with the Cree Nation in Eeyou Istchee Baie-James, a sparsely populated region in northern Quebec. This vast land of snowy forests and frozen lakes is home to 11 Indigenous communities who have been hunting and fishing here for 5,000 years. And now, thanks to Nibiischii’s recently reopened Waconichi Lodge and the first ever Cree-run national park, it’s possible for visitors to experience this rich culture and pristine environment year-round. From morning snowshoe hikes to evening storytelling sessions, it’s a rare chance to experience human nature and Mother Nature in their rawest form.
🔗Read Hannah’s full story at the link in bio.
