I leave for Lisbon tonight. It’ll be my first international trip in well over a year. Everyone keeps asking me if I’m ready. I don’t know how to answer them. Am I ready logistically? I suppose—I have a new suitcase and a renewed passport and two weeks of accommodation booked. Emotionally? Also yes. I’m sad to leave New York, but...
Hello from the passenger seat of my beloved (and newly reconstructed) Penny as the valleys of central Pennsylvania rush by my window. Smoke hangs in long coils above the copses of oaks and aspens. Blue-grey clouds, long and low like train-flattened pennies, crowd in the rearview as raindrops splat and shake their way up the windshield. I’m on the road...
Welcome to New York (It’s Been Waiting for You) A fun little essay in which I tell you my life philosophy and how it served me as three (okay, it was actually four) very unpleasant things happened to me all at once. Blood (not mine), penises (also not mine), and vehicle damage (sadly, mine) are all involved; take this as...
No tears this time around. Wild how three months will do that to you, isn’t it? Take you and reflect you back to yourself, warped and wavy along the edges. Time is funny that way. Years feel infinite until you break them up into their disparate days. Every time I sit down to write one of these, I feel like...
Rereading my Q1 goal wrap-up to prepare for writing this one made me cry. I’ve been crying fairly regularly lately—the complete dissolution of some of the major parts and people in your life will do that do you—and this wasn’t a particularly bad jag. Just a few chest-shaking, staccato-breathing moments and a couple of sharp inhales. My face didn’t turn...
Today I’m thinking about home. About wanting a home and about the tradeoffs and opportunities of having one. I’m thinking about all the homes I’ve been in over the last three months (we’ve officially been on the road in the U.S. for a quarter of a year!). All of the couches and air mattresses I’ve slept on, all of the...
The West is quiet. It’s far apart. I feel none of the Midwest warmth, but also none of the Midwest focus on who you are, where your family comes from, what you look like. There’s no small-town feel; there aren’t towns. Just big stretches of completely different landscapes, studded now and again with a big city, each with its own...
It’s 1 p.m. and I’m in a stale-smelling hotel room in St. Louis, Missouri regretting this trip. I know these moments come. I know travel sometimes chafes like a polyester blend and leaves me uncomfortable. It can make me tired and grumpy, nervous and anxious, regretful and asking myself why (why!!) I thought this was a good idea. So I will...
Friends, family, readers—below is the first travel post on Kath Meets World! I wrote it about my trip to Catalina Island this spring, to get back into the habit about writing about my travels and to have an example of one of the types of posts I’ll be sharing here. For others, explore the categories above, and for my version...