LA Weekend in photos

Ooh I'm excited. LA always gets me all tingly.
It's a break from being a mini-van driving mom. It's a break from being an adult who plays with kids all day. It's a break from our little mountain village and the 12" of snow predicted to fall tonight.
Our plans got a monkey wrench thrown at them last week when an employee fell and broke his wrist. We now cannot leave until Friday night. It will be a short trip with only Saturday to spend in the sunshine.
Breakfast will be provided by the hotel here.

We will then venture to the LA Convention Center to meet this man.

Dinner will be had here.

Maybe we can even get Rick to agree to dine with us.
After dinner we will swing by the mall to do a little celebrity sighting and stop by the American Girl store.

Then we will settle back in to the hotel to watch Pay-Per-View Movies all night. In the morning we will stop by here for a little snack.

Then it's back on the road home.

It's not that exciting I know, but after months in the mountains it is refreshing to venture out into civilization even if it's only for a day. We'll come back refreshed and ready to spend two more months in the cold and ice. It really is the little things that make life interesting.

Waxing LA

So I live in a mountain village. It's cold here. We were a lot of fleece and not-so-attractive sensible shoes. We need our hair. It's cold here and that's what hair is for... to keep ya warm.

With that in mind I keep my hair long, yes of course the hair on my head, I'm no lesbian, but also the hair on my face, again reiterating my non-lesbian status.

In the summer I get my mustache, chin and eyebrows done like every 6-8 weeks. It's summer. It needs to be done. But in the winter I slack off, my face just gets too cold and chapped. I need that extra hair on my face.

But with our trip to LA next weekend I feel the need to go in and get a quick clean-up. I only get that feeling when we go to some city where looking like a cool mountain chick is not an acceptable look. LA is definitely one of those places. You just cannot have a mustache in LA. That's what those border checks are for, not fruit and illegal immigrants, but bad facial hair. They really don't want you in the city if you plan on looking like a neanderthal. It's not allowed.

This was a difficult idea for me to wrap my mind around when I first transplanted to SoCal from Illinois. In Illinois, as in Flagstaff, facial hair is a necessity. I had never heard of waxing in Illinois. I mean sure you might get your undercarriage waxed for a vacation, but your face? Never.

I come from a long line of hairy German women. I myself missed the worst of that gene, but my mother is perfectly content to walk around with a full German woman mustache. My sister who lives permanently in SoCal and has dark facial hair gets herself taken care of frequently so that they allow her to continue her residency. I on the other hand, have the hairy gene, but was blessed with my father's fair skin and hair. I tend to the blond and light brown range, so my mustache is only out of hand when those rogue bristly grey and black hairs pop up and mark me as in need of a waxing.

Yes it hurts, but the results really are mind bottling. It's a small subtle change when your chin is smooth and your eyebrows are perfectly shaped. It really does make you feel like a new woman. So I'm gonna get my smooth on for Rick Steves next week and try and make myself presentable enough to be able to shop at the Grove. I am a mountain woman, but it's February and I need to shed my winter hair.

LA Times Travel and Adventure Show 2013

It's coming again.... are you ready?

It's the LA Times Travel and Adventure Show!

February 23-24 at the LA Convention Center, only $10.00 to get it.

All my favorite people will be there: RICK STEVES, Arthur Frommer, Rudy Maxa, Amazing Race Host Phil Keoghan, and for reasons yet unknown to me, Andrew McCarthy will be there too.

Of course I will be there Saturday watching my favorite tour guide, Rick Steves, give his European Travel Skills lecture from 3:00 -4:30.
I'll probably drop in on Phil Keoghan's lecture too, but we'll have the kids with us, so we'll probably have to keep the lectures to a minimum.

If you've never been, it's super cool, but only if you love to armchair travel and love brochures. I myself have a very powerful need to collect brochures. Am I ever going to visit Sudan? No, probably not, but if they have an awesome brochure I want to read all about it. There are giant color catalogs from all the cruise companies, strange little booklets for green adventure tours in Costa Rica, flyers from  Land Rover tour companies wanting to tour you through the silk road, and just mom and pop places that want you to stay with them in Northern California. It's a melting pot of travel tastes.

Carl and I have been starting to think about possibly starting a tour company of some kind, so I'm going to be there to scope out the competition this year and find out what's new and cool in travel. I love Europe, but hasn't it been done to death? Carl loves off-road travel, but how many Hummer, Jeep and Rover tours does the world need? I'm going to find out.

I'll report back in a few weeks and this year I am going to get my picture with Rick if it's the last thing I do!

The Cluny Museum

Right down the street from our hotel in Paris is this amazing place that I have never been before, the Cluny Museum. Yes, you can read about all the cool art inside, the unicorns, the tapestries, etc, etc, but just look at that building! Why do you need art when the building looks like this?

It's one of the oldest buildings in Paris, a 15th century house for the Cluny Abbot built over an ancient Roman bath. Does it even get any more historical than that? Ewww I can't wait. This is just one of the many places that is on my MUST DO list for Paris. I am going try and spend lots of time exploring the left-bank of Paris, especially  St Germain and the Latin Quarter, an area I never even stepped foot into on my first visit.

I want to feel all of the really old parts of Paris. I'm not too worried about the big sites; the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, and the Champs Elysees. I'm not worried about eating fancy and drinking wine. That's not my thing, but I do want to feel the history and to walk in the midst of history. I want that far away feeling that tries to transport you and makes you feel like you are part of something bigger that IS history. I don't often get that feeling here in Flagstaff.

Visiting the Grand Canyon last weekend, which is way older than Paris, that feeling just isn't the same. There is only a geologic sense of history, but not the human sense of history. Here we have nature and a lot of man vs. nature, but in cities the feeling is different.

I remember the last time I went on a big sight seeing trip to Boston I was overwhelmed with walking in history on the Freedom Trail. You can see the grave stones of Paul Revere and John Hancock. You can see the bell tower where the lanterns were hung to signal that the British were coming. It is overwhelming. Any one who has any kind of love of history and humanity will feel the immensity of standing in these historic places.

It just gives my goosebumps.

XANAX Test

I had a doctor's appointment a couple of weeks ago, but my regular doctor had a baby in December, so I got shuffled off to another guy in the practice who it turns out is way better than my regular doctor. I mean I really don't like women to start with, and my regular doctor was the least offensive of all the doctors I'd tried, but still she gave me that heeby-jeeby feeling whenever I saw her. This new guy was AMAZING.  He told me stories, let me tell stories, listened to me, teased my old doctor a little bit, and was overall a cool guy.

I'm just going to come out and say it. Men make better doctors that women. A man delivered my first two babies, and a woman the third, and the man had the better bedside manner. He listened better, and prescribed better drugs.

This brings me to the point of this post. I got this new guy to prescribe me some Xanax. He did it like it was no big deal. He did it like he understood my suffering and wanted to help relieve it. So crazy, I know, right. He was like try the Xanax and also try this other new thing I've been giving out... blood pressure medication for panic attacks. He let me try two different drugs at the same time! Prescriptions in hand I left a very happy camper.

I've written on this is the past about all the things I've heard about Xanax. I mean it's used all the time on TV and reality TV. I wanted to know what the big deal was. Is it really so amazing about calming down a panic attack? I had to know.

So I waited a couple of weeks to see if I had even the tiniest inkling of a panic attack to try the stuff. Things are going pretty damn well right now, so I'm pretty stress free, i.e. panic attack free. But last Friday I was really cranky and everything was setting me off and thought... it's now or never.

I took the pill on a full stomach around four in the afternoon. Probably about 20 minutes after I had taken the pill I started to feel a little bit woozy. It was different that a 2 glasses of wine buzz, and different than a Vicodin fog, but still woozy and warm. I just went and sat down on the couch and watched a little Say Yes to the Dress, and next thing I new it was 45 minutes later and I was waking up from a short, deep nap. I got up, resumed my evening as usual and that was it.

Was I less stressed? Well yeah. I had just taken a nap. Nothing nips stress in the bud like a nap. But is that what it's supposed to do? I have no idea. My first tests are inconclusive. I wasn't having a full blown panic attack when I took the pill, but it's alway good to test out a medication in a controlled environment first before needing to use it during a crisis. But it was definitely not what I had expected.
I think I wanted it to take over and whisk away my concerns and stressors with that infinite calm that we all occasionally feel. But I don't think a pill can do that.

I'll keep it in my arsenal, but I'm not convinced of its powers yet.

Bath and Paris

The tickets have been bought. The hotels have been booked. The luggage has been bought. The maps have been printed. The guide books have been bookmarked. We are going to Europe in May!

I am so excited I could pee. I can't stop using Google street view to walk the streets by our hotels. I can't stop reading up on Paris and England. It's almost my every waking thought.

I've finally gotten a prescription for Xanax to assist me in actually getting on a plane and leaving my kids for a couple of weeks. The last time I was in Europe I did not have the best time. Between attempting to translate for my parents, missing my high school boyfriend (who was not missing me), having multiple panic attacks, and attempting to live off of baguettes and street vendor ice cream, I did not appreciate Paris the way I should have.

This time it will be different. I will be prepared. I will have my husband with me, and I will be a fully formed adult instead of a young 18 year old girl traveling with her very un-worldly parents.

I just bought a brand new Jessica Simpson suitcase, with leopard print lining. I'm brushing up on my French. I seem to have forgotten a lot of important nouns and verbs.

I'm going to try and write about the whole journey: right now the prep work, the history, the planning, the packing (What does one wear in Paris?), and then the trip itself, followed by the inevitable aftermath, the depression that follows an amazing trip.

Please stick with me for the ride along.