All posts tagged: new year

The Highway 1 in my Head

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It’s funny how memory works, or doesn’t work, in some cases. On non-working holidays like this, for instance, when I have to write a throwback travel piece about that California road trip we did in 2009, I beat my brains for details to make up even a half-coherent story, and my memory fails me. Where did we stay? What was that park? How many days, exactly, were we on the road? How many miles was it? Why did I take that picture—was that tunnel important? The drive along the famous Pacific Coast Highway, or California State Road 1, was a spur-of-the-moment decision—this much I’m sure of. My roommate, a Filipino nurse in San Francisco, learned that he would not be on duty the first few days of the year, my then-fiancé could take a day off, and my cousin, a teaching assistant, wouldn’t have class till the following week. I, well, I was soon headed back to Hong Kong—my home base then—and was looking for an awesome trip to end my six months in the …

Yellow Burst

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This time last year — that sounds so far away already — the husband and I welcomed 2014 in a quiet mountain lodge at the foot of Mt. Banahaw, a mystical place considered sacred by the locals in Quezon, about two hours south of Manila. For three days we had no Internet or cellphone signal. We spent hours and hours reading, sleeping, talking about our dreams, and picking raspberries and mushrooms. We ate locally grown vegetables and drank water sourced from a nearby spring. We did whatever people did when they had time. We would walk in the morning and in the afternoon, chatting with friendly neighbors along the way. I saw this yellow flower on one of our morning treks on January 1 and thought, “This thing’s just bursting to be!” And I suddenly couldn’t wait to live 2014, which ended six days ago, with family and money games and a lot of eating. I wonder how nature will inspire me this 2015.