TRAVEL THERE: SIGHTSEEING BY THE SEAT OF OUR PANTS
Bill was loving the pace of this vacation. We focused on one big thing for each day and then stuffed a few things around the edges. I’ll admit we were having a great time, but now we had a full day with no primary event to build around. What would we do with ourselves on our last day in Scottsdale?
Museum Girl vs. Adventure Boy
Were Museum Girl in charge of the world, I’d start each day at the entrance of a museum, historical home or palace about 10 minutes before opening. For variety, I would visit gardens. How long I spent there would depend on where I was. It took all day to visit the Chicago Institute of Art and I would have been happy to go back the next morning and give it another shot. My visits to the Dallas Arboretum last 2 or 3 hours, but I go frequently. Bestie and I can hit multiple venues in one day, going from bright and early to evening openings.
Adventure Guy likes to wake up slow. He doesn’t mind sharing my cultural venues, but he likes to mix it up with golf games, shopping and perhaps a boat ride – stopping for coffee and ice cream when it suits him. He saw everything he was interested in seeing at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in about an hour. He really doesn’t want to plan out a whole day. He just likes to ramble from one thing to the next and take naps from time to time.
Adventure Guy sometimes acknowledges this laid back approach to travel requires more research and planning on Museum Girl’s part than he even wants to know about, but he prefers to luxuriate in the fantasy that it all just comes together magically. I’ve endeavored to make him interested in my more structured approach to travel, but after 26 years I know one thing – if Adventure Guy ain’t happy, Museum Girl is going to be miserable. So, I’m in charge of seeing that everything goes the way he wants it to.
While I like some structure to my travel days, I learned one very important fact on the Anniversary Cruise. Seven days of 10.5 hour shore excursions do not make for a pleasant trip. We’re trying to find some sort of balance between our two styles, because my style could be called Death by Vacation and his Loosing While Snoozing.
Our Slow Start
I try to sleep in on vacation, but it just doesn’t work. I’m doing good if I’m not bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at 5 AM. On this particular morning I woke up and tried to get my thoughts organized. We’d hit all the must-dos and had really enjoyed ourselves, but in researching for this casual approach to our vacation, I had found a whole lot of other things that I wished we could do, including some repeats, like Taliesin and the Desert Botanical Garden. I prepared myself to present the potential activities in the most unbiased way I could, but I was really hoping for a peek at the Musical Instrument Museum.
Though I was up early, we didn’t walk out of our room until 11. We headed over to Nellie Cashman’s Monday Club Cafe for what we thought was going to be Sunday Brunch, but come to find out, said brunch had been replaced by a fairly expensive breakfast buffet. We had a $75 gift certificate we needed to use, but who would have guessed it all went to breakfast.
Of all the things I offered up to see, Bill opted to start at Fashion Square. To be fair, I wanted him to see it. Mom and I had visited when we came through in 2003 and it had been a great experience – upscale people-watching in a beautiful shopping mall. I’ll be kind and say it just wasn’t what it used to be. It’s still a gorgeous place, but all upscale people go somewhere else and the downscale people weren’t there either. The caliber of stores had nose-dived since my visit, also.
That behind us, we decided to walk a little bit and come to find out, the travel god were with us – or at least with me! Come back next week and we’ll visit the Waterfront Wine & Art Festival.
jane sadek 