The road is my middle name

Winter break was a whirlwind - I spent a few days in Chicago, then packed up my friend's car and headed southwest. After some less-than-ideal weather in the Ozarks, dullness in Oklahoma and the terrible traffic in Dallas, we pulled into Austin for a few days with another old friend. She showed us a grand ol' time, which mostly involved extensive amounts of eating. Austin has crazy good food, dudes. Like, ridiculously good. Like, I've-been-dreaming-about-it good. The tacos alone were reason enough to move there. And don't even get me started on the gourmet doughnut truck! And the cupcake truck... even me, hater of the frou-frou cupcake trend, was charmed!


And the shopping - I have never so badly wanted a pair of cowboy boots as I did during the thirty minutes we spent perusing the shelves of Allen's Boots.


Obviously, these shoes and I are meant to be - I just have to dig up a spare six hundred bucks somewhere. Easy-peasy, right?


Even the store signage was amazing!


My love of tacos and cowboy boots aside, Austin was phenomenal. After a weekend, though, the road started calling us, so we piled back into the car and drove west across the gorgeous sandy emptiness of west Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The sunset outside of El Paso was particularly stunning, even with all the traffic:


Soon, though, we were dying to return home, and even the rain in Southern California couldn't dampen our excitement about being back in the Golden State. We celebrated with date shakes in Palm Springs:


After a near-disastrous break-pad experience, we pulled into Los Angeles for a night with Isaac and Lizz who wined and dined in the glamorous manner to which we would love to have become accustomed. Revived with a delicious dinner at Good Girl Dinette and a deep night's sleep, we decided to take on the torrential downpour and headed for the Grapevine. Six hours and eight chapters of Stephen Fry's autobiographical audiobook later, we were pulling into the 'rents home in friendly old Berkeley.

And so, after a week and a half on the road, three weeks in the warm embrace of my family, and two weddings, I returned to the great state of Delaware for winter term. Not for long, though - this weekend I take off for two weeks in London with my graduate cohort for a trip the Winterthur program refers to as "History of English Design" but that I prefer to think of as The "So, You Think You Like Museums? THINK AGAIN" Tour of 2011. Ah, the life of the international jet-setter.

Return to the Second City

Essays are finished, my sketchbook filled with drawings of questionable quality has been turned in, and I've worked very hard to stop thinking about the rococo armchair I misidentified on an exam. I woke up this morning in a tiny bedroom under a flight of stairs, looking out on a snow-covered street and thinking, "thank goodness I have my snowboots," and that can only mean one thing: I'm back in Chicago, baby!

My plans for the next few days are simple: visit friends at the Chicago History Museum, relish in the presence of public transportation, and eat everything, everywhere. And then I hop in the car with one of my oldest friends and we drive south for an epic roadtrip that will eventually take us home to California! All in all, I think this is shaping up to be a remarkable winter break.

Baby, you can drive my car (except you can't, because it is government property)

So the nice folks here at Grey Towers have been utterly fooled by my suspiciously capable attitude toward cars and have actually decided to let me operate government vehicles. Crazy, right? And I even told them about the time I hit the $90,000 Mercedes two hours after I had gotten my license and they weren't fazed! I didn't, however, mention my talent at bursting tires - that seemed like a discussion for a later time.

Still, yesterday I was tooling around back and forth from the mansion to the archives storage in a snazzy Jeep Patriot (and have you ever heard of a more jingoistic car? Why don't they just call it the Jeep "I love America more than you, pinko commie terrorist!"?), and I felt very powerful, and also a little like The Man. I had my uniform on, my big government SUV even had the Forest Service seal on it, and I had keys jangling at my hip that could unlock every door in the park. And a radio! It doesn't get more The Man than that.*

I kept hoping to come along some kids graffitti-ing something so I could park my truck, slowly get out, and saunter coolly over to them, all the while peering out menacingly over the rim of my aviators. And then I'd say authoritatively, "you kids know you're messing with government property, which is a felony?" Of course, I don't know if it is or isn't (I'm thinking isn't), and of course I couldn't speak authoritatively to a chipmunk, much less a human being, so this is where the fantasy starts to fall apart.

I don't think I'm actually cut out to be The Man, if only because my 1960's counter-revolutionary high school teachers would be appalled. Still, the car is pretty neat.

*Okay, so a gun would have helped the image, but no one here would be stupid enough to entrust me with fire arms.