Verwandte Artikel zu Avoiding Prison and Other Noble Vacation Goals: Adventures...

Avoiding Prison and Other Noble Vacation Goals: Adventures in Love and Danger - Softcover

Dale, Wendy

 
9780609809839: Avoiding Prison and Other Noble Vacation Goals: Adventures in Love and Danger
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0609809830 ISBN 13: 9780609809839
Verlag: Three Rivers Pr, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

The author describes her travels to such locales as Cuba, Lebanon, and Costa Rica, and the romances she has along the way.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Wendy Dale is the cowriter of the Emmy-nominated television feature The New Adventures of Mother Goose. She lives in Los Angeles. This is her first book.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One

Will Honduras Endure Us?

Moving to a Third World nation with no job and no concrete plans for the future was an interesting plan, the kind that could seem reasonable under certain circumstances--like when you've reached the part of the tequila bottle when you're faced with the decision of eating the worm. At this point, a lot of insane ideas could occur to you. You have a round, ribbed invertebrate in your mouth: moving to one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere with a kid, maybe even two, could seem like a really good idea.

However, my mother didn't drink. So as we discussed her imminent plans to flee the United States with my father, I leaned against the kitchen counter in my parent's middle-class suburban Phoenix home, amazed that I was staring at a completely sober individual. After all, that was half my gene pool standing in front of me--not even one of those genes drove her to consume alcohol?

My mother happily gnawed away on a piece of red licorice and explained that she had limited their choices down to two potential areas: Asia and Latin America. Each of these places had its benefits and drawbacks. For instance, India would be the cheapest place, but it had the most frightening diseases. Did I have any opinion on this?

"I think you should avoid leprosy at all costs, Mom."

"Good point," she said, drawing a line through half a dozen countries. "Anything else?"

"Guerrilla warfare--also not a good thing."

"Hmmm. How about Guatemala?"

"Too soon after the era of peasant disappearances."

"El Salvador?"

"Mother, please."

"Nicaragua?"

"The beginning of democracy after years of socialism--not a stable political climate."

"You're not making this easy. Do you have any suggestions?"

"How about Italy?"

My mother shook her head vehemently.

"What's the matter with Italy? Red wine, pasta, hazelnut gelato. No one could possibly object to a nice place like Venice, Rome, or Florence."

"No, no, no! Do you know the percentage of homes with running water there? We could never afford a First World country."

As if the idea should have been obvious to me from the beginning, my mother took a frustrated sigh and stressed that the goal was to choose a poor country where their funds would stretch the furthest. In certain Central American nations, a thousand dollars a month would pay for a luxurious four-bedroom house, living expenses, even cover the costs of a full-time maid. This was the whole reason they were planning to leave the United States in the first place. If they found a favorable exchange rate, they could live off their savings and would never have to work again.

"Well, where are you going to go?" I asked.

"There's one place left."

As my mother said the word "Honduras," the other half of my gene pool asked me to go to the fridge and get him a stiff drink.

Fleeing to a new place and leaving one's problems behind was a proud family tradition. My mother had grown up this way, having been raised by army parents who roamed all over the world and finally retired in Mexico. And there was an alarming indication of it on my father's side as well. My grandma Barb had managed to live in Arizona for more than thirty years, took a vacation to Hawaii one day, returned home long enough to pick up a few things, kissed her husband good-bye, and moved to Honolulu.

My uncle Bob was the only one in the family who hadn't quite come to terms with the concept of travel as a means of escape. His work as an international photojournalist had taken him out of the country often enough, though he'd always wound up in nations with even more problems than the ones he was trying to avoid. In an attempt to elude his ex-wife, he'd fled to Central America in the eighties, though after a few years of running from guerrillas, the governments of crazed dictators, and paramilitary forces out to kill him, the idea of being chased by a diminutive blond woman started to seem pretty damn appealing. He returned to the States, vowed never to set foot in a Third World region again, and locked himself away in a private manicured neighborhood in suburban West Virginia, where the majority of his time was spent reading gourmet cookbooks and consuming expensive foods and wines with Italian names.

A typical conversation with him would go something like this: "It's not pen pasta. It's pen-eh. And whatever you do, if you ever decide to travel, make sure you go to Europe."

He was the most vocal opponent of my parents' impending move, but the pesto-stained letters that arrived in their mailbox with the message "Don't do it" did little to deter my folks. They were used to picking up and heading off to exotic places. They had taught us kids early on that distancing yourself from your problems was as easy as calling up the moving company. The Dale family members dialed the toll-free number for Allied Movers as if it were a crisis hotline.

By the time I was sixteen, my dad's mining engineering jobs had taken us to Arizona, California, Tennessee, South Carolina, Minnesota, Montana, and Peru--and this nomadic lifestyle was something I never considered a hardship. Whenever times got rough at school (which they inevitably did for the new girl who spent her free time in the library reading about the latest scientific discoveries in Discover magazine), I knew that all I had to do was endure the barbs of the kids for a little while, because soon we'd be leaving.

I approached all of our impending departures with unwavering optimism. Each time, I convinced myself that this move had to be the one that would take me to that scholastic utopia I was seeking, a place where the students got together during their free time for fun and informative didactic chats, where they met up after school happily exchanging useful tips on the periodic table, evolution, and relativity.

In South Carolina, the kids just called me booger-picker because they were ignorant--everybody said "over yonder" and "young 'uns"; I became convinced that all we had to do was move to a place where they didn't speak this way. In the northern part of the United States, I was sure eighth-graders sat around debating the finer points of quantum mechanics.

When I was thirteen, and my mother came into my room yet again to explain that my father had a new job, there was only one thing I needed to know about our future destination of Minnesota: "Mom, do they say 'you guys' there instead of 'y'all'?" (The answer to this question was yes; however, for anyone who has never been to Minnesota, I feel the need to tell you that the eighth-graders do not in fact sit around discussing particle physics over lunch. Apparently there is still some distance between the phrase "you guys" and the phrase "Newton's corpuscular theory of light failed to adequately explain why the empirically measured entropy of pure substances at equilibrium tends toward zero as the absolute temperature decreases toward zero.")

Growing up, moving had never been a big deal for any of us, and now that my folks planned to go to Honduras without even visiting the place beforehand, no one in my family was entirely shocked. My mother explained that this was the best thing for my father--he needed a change of pace, a more relaxed existence, and I couldn't possibly object to something that was supposed to do my father good.

Everyone in my family was slightly in awe of my dad. All the good attributes came from his side of the family--he had wound up with brains and looks. When I was twenty-three and got diagnosed with gallbladder...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Three Rivers Pr
Erscheinungsdatum
2003
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0609809830
ISBN 13 
9780609809839
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
326
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar